


I Need You So Much Closer

by afogocado



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Angst, DFAB reader, Drinking, Eventual Smut, F/M, Fluff, Friends to Lovers, Incest, M/M, Polyamory, Romance, Slow Burn, Smoking, manipulative parent, slightly AU
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-01-22
Updated: 2017-10-17
Packaged: 2018-09-19 07:43:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 47,756
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9427406
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/afogocado/pseuds/afogocado
Summary: Everybody in Gravity Falls heard that those strange scientists in their spooky cabin in the woods were broke and needed help. But, they didn’t get what your role was working for them, or why you moved in with them. Your mother begs you to come home, destroyed by the rumors of polyamory and indecent acts that follow you everywhere. Then, the other Pines twin comes to town. The gossip gets worse, but you didn't know love like this could be so terrible and wonderful.In which you (Reader) work for and stay with Ford, Stan, and McGucket before all the portal nonsense happens.Title from Death Cab for Cutie's 'Transatlanticism'.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> First chapters are always so hard for me! I just wanted to get this part away from my brain so I can focus on the better parts of the story. The Reader is going to have an enemies-to-lovers relationship with Ford.

 

 

Before you can even ask yourself or wonder, you already know that he’s the one sitting on a brick wall at the far corner outside of the library smoking a cigarette. ‘What a cliché,’ you think and try to find some amusement there. He’s coughing as though he’s not done this in a long time, or he just started and isn’t ready to figure out how to breathe again. He is bundled in a thick, red cable knit sweater, layered all the way to his neck, and a beige coat (not unlike a lab coat) covers his layers and his body. He’s kicking his heavy booted feet in time to something probably playing in his head. The heels of his boots clack against the wall, beating old snow to the ground.

 

He looks like an ill, older man from farther away. He looks ill up close, too. Well, you’ve dealt with sick yourself and with others. But this was a different kind of sick—something deeper, something off. Something wrenching his insides and his mind in a tormenting vice grip.

 

‘You’re just being weird because he’s a stranger,’ you tell yourself, and go with that.

 

It is February in Gravity Falls, Oregon, and you are lucky to be here at all. It’s been difficult finding a job since you graduated from college, with a master’s degree no less. You had to move back home from Portland to live with your mother while you looked for work. And it sounded too good to be true when you found an ad in a discreet corner of the Gravity Falls Gossiper a couple of weeks ago. It called for a grant writer of some sort for the young scientist (sitting and smoking) and his partner (not here) who just moved into a cabin in the woods less than two years ago. Well, you didn’t go to college to be a grant writer, but you had the skills.

 

Your mother had failed to mention these scientist types anytime you came home to visit or anytime she called or wrote to you while you were in school. Guess he wasn’t doing much in those woods. Or, the newness of him being there was finally not so sensational and the town found something else to talk about.

 

But whatever it was that he got up to, he was now out of money and needed a good writer to document his research, clean up papers of his own, and submit proposals to donors, non-profits, and research institutions, inquiring about research grants. You mailed him a self-addressed, self-stamped envelope of myriad samples of your writing, and he hired you instantly. There hadn’t been an interview, but that’s what you were doing today, meeting the boss.

 

You bring yourself back to the present and watch the not-young-but-not-quite-old man from afar.

 

He would hold the cigarette nimbly between his teeth and then wrap the coat tighter around himself still when the wind picked up. You don’t know how he’s sitting on the concrete wall—his ass must be numb from the cold.

 

The howling wind tousles his dark hair. When you get closer, you notice a strange, thick premature gray streak. Its like a flash of lightening had blown through it at some point, or he’d seen something that scared him half to death. You’ve heard of something like this happening before, or maybe that was just in the movies. When you are in front of him, you see a kind of weariness around his eyes that was uncanny and almost grotesque with how unreal it made his gaze. 

 

He pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose and stands when you get there. You hand him the coffee he asked for you to bring. 

 

“Did anyone follow you?” He asks. His voice is shot. He takes a long sip from the paper cup and you feel your mouth burn for him. It’s cold outside, but that coffee is way too hot for all that.

 

“I don’t think so,” you tell him, but this answer isn’t good enough. Instead you say (blurt out, really), “You’re a lot bigger than I expected.” It was absolutely a thought you meant to keep in your head.

 

This tickles him and he chuckles in a gruff way that sounds like it hurt his throat. He doesn’t wince and guzzles more coffee as though he hasn’t had something to wet his throat in days. “Yeah, well you’re short,” he quips. He almost laughs in spite of himself: it was, after all, a comeback worthy of his brother to have made. 

 

“I figured it’d be easier to meet you here,” he continues. “The cabin isn’t exactly in the most convenient location for out-of-towners to navigate to.” He stomps out his cigarette. You bite back the smart-aleck retort that you’re the local here and he’s the outsider.

 

He offers you his now free hand to which you are able to stop yourself from blurting out, “Wow, six fingers.”

 

He doesn’t seem to mind, but he doesn’t address it. Instead, you get, “Stanford Pines.”

 

You tell him your name. 

 

He starts to walk away from the library and you tread after him with the eagerness of a duckling.

Something about the way he holds himself is familiar. Even his face drudges something up from the memories nestled in the back of your mind. If his hair was less gray and a bit longer, you would know him, you think.

 

The two of you walk in silence as he drinks his coffee. You watch him hold is in a light way, all six fingers wrapped around it. He eyes the cup once its empty and crushes it easily in his hand before tossing it in a nearby trashcan on the sidewalk.

 

“Oh, I remember you,” you gasp this out as though it were the epiphany you were waiting for your whole life. “Standing around outside of gas stations and the coffee shops around campus with a paper cup in your hand, asking for change. You approached me one time, wanting a stamp?”

 

“You’re mistaken. That wasn’t me.” This is the first flash of unkindness you see in his dark eyes. He doesn’t stop walking. If anything, he picks up the pace and so do you.

 

You furrow you brow, jamming your cold hands into the pockets of your pea coat. “Looked a hell of a lot like you, then. Minus the glasses.”

 

“I tell you. You were mistaken.”

 

You walk in silence through downtown. He is deep in thought and you worry if you’ve said something to compromise your chance at a job.

 

You pass by Greasy’s Diner and patrons look out their window at the two of you walking in a disgruntled silence. Some of them look surprised. You don’t know if its because they hadn’t seen you since you were in high school, or if it had anything to do with being in his company.

 

“My partner,” his gruff voice tears your gaze away from Toby Determined’s goofy mug (its worse than you remember), “er, my _lab_ partner, I mean. He’s out of town. McGucket. He’s a good enough guy. We went to college together. He’s a brilliant engineer. He brings my nearly impossible ideas to reality.”

 

“McGucket?” You wonder what the hell kind of name that is.

 

“Yes.”

 

You walk longer, leaving the diner behind. You’re glad that the town is good about cleaning up the snow and preparing the sidewalks. This trek back to the cabin would have been even worse.

 

“I say this because he has our car. Sorry I couldn’t offer you a ride.” But Stanford Pines does not sound sorry at all.

 

“Its fine; I’m used to walking everywhere anyway.” You smile up at him.

 

He returns a small smile and doesn’t say anything for a while still, until, “Its not much further now.”

 

And he was right. After some hiking in the woods down a beaten path, you come out to a clearing. In the clearing was a good-sized cabin that had a wrap-around porch around the entire perimeter.

 

“Most of the grant money went to building this place. I’ve spent a good amount on maintaining it. I’ve been thinking of just hiring someone to help with that.”

 

“Well,” you offer, “I’m no stranger to helping take care of a home. I could do some things for you.”

 

He mutters something about that not being necessary while leading you up the short few steps and into the living room.

 

It is definitely a bachelor’s pad, in every stereotypical way. But it was more than that. It reminds you of all the labs and professor’s offices you saw back in school: papers and gadgets crammed everywhere. Yes, these two are definitely pack rats as well as geniuses.

 

“I’ve been meaning to get McGucket to throw some of this stuff out. A lot of it is unused. More of it are bits and pieces of some prototypes of inventions.” He grimaces at this before looking back down at you. “I can give you a tour later, if you’d like. I’ll run down to the lab in a second and give you a stack of proposals with descriptions of projects to start on for today. You may work in the kitchen if you like.”

 

You raise your eyebrow at him. You didn’t sign on to be his cook or anything.

 

He stumbles over his words, his hand flying to the back of his neck, “I didn’t mean to insinuate that a woman belongs in the kitchen. I just meant that there’s a cleared off table in there that you may find more comfortable to work at. Plus there are windows.”

 

“I could do that.”

 

“The lab isn’t the safest place in the house.”

 

“Why?”

 

But he doesn’t tell you. Instead, he leads you to their massively cluttered kitchen full of empty take out boxes.

 

You sit at the only chair.

 

“I’ll be right back up. I’m very busy at the moment, so if you want to put in a regular set of hours today, I would appreciate that very much. I’ll probably still be working when its time for you to go. Feel free to let yourself out.”

You watch him retreat from the room as quickly as he showed it to you. Yikes, this place. Maybe you _would_ have to do some cleaning for them.

 

Stanford Pines brings back a black, three inch binder and drops it on the table. He digs in his coat’s pocket for a pen and hands that to you. “There’s coffee already made. You’ll need it.”

 

You take the pen from him, locking your eyes onto his gaze. What a weird man.

 

This is definitely going to be interesting. You forget about the binder once you hear a door slam shut somewhere. You work your way around the clutter to look around the house.


	2. Take My Love in Real Small Doses

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the reader shares intimate moments getting to know Ford and McGucket, and experiences unpleasantness from her mother and the townsfolk.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry if this is boring. I love slow burns and build-ups.
> 
> Title from Interpol's 'Obstacle 2'.

\---

Whatever isn’t layered in dust just sits in tall piles and you know most of this crap hasn’t been touched since it was dragged inside. The lighting in the cabin is awful and dull and yellow. There needs to be more natural light, but all of the windows have heavy curtains that only wrap the darkness tightly in. You figure they’re probably used as some kind of padding or barricade to help keep the cold out.

‘They’re running out of stuff to put their stuff on,’ you tell yourself, rationalizing the absurdity of it all, and all the hunks of junk. In a way, its like they never grew out of being college kids who don’t know how to take care of themselves and their living space. Dr. Pines (you have no idea what else to call him, but he has twelve PhDs, so it seems appropriate) said something about he and his lab partner being here for two years. But, they’ve accumulated so much stuff it looks like they’ve been here nearly two decades. Like they live in a house full of memories that span a lifetime.

There are perpetually damp places on their spotty and terribly 1960s carpet and you grimace when you walk into them in your socked feet. There are burn marks, too, probably from Stanford Pines smoking indoors. The living room is less cluttered, but only because it looks like someone is actually living in it. Piles of very worn clothes and empty beer cans litter the floor near the long couch that holds scattered books, used tissues, and pillows.

You’re pressing a palm into one of the pillows when you hear a car pull up to the front of the cabin. The headlights cut through the night and an even duller yellow infiltrates the grungy window shades and curtains. You step up to one and pull a curtain back, angling your gaze enough to peek through broken blinds.

You see a tall, birdlike man clamber out of the red Jeep Cherokee’s driver side once its engine is killed. Even though he is bundled in a coat and has a heavy knit cap smashed onto his head, he looks very thin and potentially underfed. He is comically small against the jeep. He bundles his coat tighter to his body and skips steps out front, holding onto the porch’s railing before opening the door in such a possessive way that indicates he knows the place is unlocked.

This is Dr. Pines’ partner, you surmise, and panic sits in. You have done nothing since the sun set.

You fly towards the kitchen while you hear him stomping the snow off his boots, banging them against the wood outside. You attempt to avoid being caught spying on him and make it look like you have been working all this time. You grip a pen in a shaky hand and scribble on the margin of a page to get the black ink working.

Once the front door slams shut, you hear the man cursing in a country-twanged accent. Two heavy thuds indicate that he’s kicked his boots off. The sound of him taking his clothes off in layers is loud and distracting as you stare blankly at the pages in front of you. You sneak a glance into the other room and see him creating new piles, a trail of clothes and a scarf into the kitchen.  
He tosses his key ring onto the kitchen table without looking before turning his attention to the refrigerator, crouching down until he finds what he wants. 

He turns with a beer and pops the tab. “I be durn, Stanford neglected to tell me that you woulda been here by the time I got back.”

“He told me you were going to be out of town for the weekend on business.” You’re surprised at how easy it is to talk to him.

The man furrows his brow, deep in thought, or like this is news to him. “No, I wasn’t,” only the way he pronounces it is ‘wuddunt’, “gonna be gone that long. Just the next town over for some hardware. We’re workin’ onna terminal prototype.” You nod like this means something to you and he continues, “I told him this. Is he forgettin’ things again?” He tilts his head to the side, watching you through very focused blue eyes.

You tell him that you wouldn’t know. 

He comes over to the kitchen table and leans his thigh against it. “’Sides, I couldn’t stay out fer too long in that dang jeep. Something’s wrong with it. I’m hearin’ a weird sound. Need to take some time to figure it out and fix it.”

You don’t know what to say, so you just nod and run a nervous hand through your hair. Always the introvert, meeting new people (even just one-on-one) has never been an easy thing. You stare at him instead of trying to figure out what to say.

He’s wearing blue jeans, with a nice button-down white shirt tucked into them. He reaches up to his shirt’s collar to loosen his slim black tie. There’s something very sensual what you’re watching—you feel like you’ve caught him in an intimate moment meant to happen in a bathroom or bedroom. 

He tells you his name, his full name, Fiddleford Hadron McGucket (you marvel over how that could possibly be a real name) and you tell him yours, even though he probably already knows it.

“I read some ‘a yer writin' samples. Very clear rhetoric you use. I think you oughta be able to help us out real good.” Not only is the tie loose now, but he has unbuttoned the top two or three buttons on his shirt. He removes his tie and lays it on the table near your binder.

You swallow hard without meaning to. “I hope so.”

“What d’you think about all that so far?” He gestures towards the heavy black binder with his beer can.

You start sputtering, “I—it. I mean, I only just got here not half an hour ago. I’m a slow reader,” you finish somewhat lamely.

“That’s fine, darlin’. No rush at all.” He grins down at you and crushes his now empty can. “Besides, you got enough reading materials to last you a while. Is Stanford downstairs?”

“He said he would be in the lab.”

“He give you the tour?” But it came out like ‘tur’.

“No.”

McGucket rolls his eyes too dramatically. He digs into the fridge again and offers you a beer, asking you to follow him. “Break time for ya.”

“I love the way you think.”

He pops the tab for you before handing the beer over. You take a long swig of it. It’s so cold that it burns your throat and you grimace slightly, but it is good.

He notices the face you make and chuckles, “Right there with ya, darlin’.”

 

\--  
McGucket shows you the rest of the house. Sadly, there aren’t may empty places, save for the attic, but it looks like they refuse to go up there. It’s abandoned.

“I know we’re kinda untidy around here, but you I’m sure we can make you some room somewhere if you ever wanna little office space or somethin’.” He offers you an apologetic smile. “I guess we just let time an’ chores get away from us, is all.”

You have another beer in the kitchen with McGucket and before you know it, it’s almost ten at night and you still haven’t gotten any work done.

McGucket tells you that he’s about to turn in and that his room is just down the hall if you need anything. “Feel free to work, or leave. I reckon you’re free to put in any hours you like. Stanford oughter’ talk to ya about compensation and the like.”

“I’d like to at least get something done today,” you confess, taking your seat back at the kitchen table again.

“That’s mighty fine of ya, Y/N.” He throws your empty cans away and leaves you alone. 

Your eyes trail over the papers in the binder. Its full of project descriptions and sketches of machinery, diagrams explaining how they would work, and complicated mathematics. You yawn, pressing the back of your hand to your mouth, and flip through the pages to find something more concrete to read, but everything you come across looks like backhanded notes the two scientists have written for themselves. 

You start scribbling out critiques on a fresh sheet of paper:

Project language is jargon-heavy, transitions are jarring, and ideas are inaccessible to the reader. It is recommended that you utilize a formal, yet comprehensible language. I will go through and compile the notes you have made and format them into a proper proposal. Perhaps, you could list goals and assessment methods for me to include. Providing an action plan as to how you would like projects to move forward would be—

“You’re still here,” Stanford Pines’ gruff, but surprised, voice sounds next to you. 

You jerk back to reality and stare up at him, heart hammering in your chest and ears from how suddenly he spoke. 

His hair is tousled, like he’s had his hands in it and has been gripping at it in frustration. He is in a plain (very tightly fitting) black t-shirt and khaki pants. Even his khakis are tight and you notice how thick his thighs are, like he used to do some kind of sport.

“I just wanted to finish something up,” you tell him. 

He looks at you in a funny sort of way, like this was a dumb thing to say or you’ve bothered him somehow. Maybe he caught you staring at his legs. Stupid.

“How long have you been standing there?” You notice how breathless you sound from the short fright he gave you, and you feel your ears warm with embarrassment. 

“I’m not sure,” he goes to check his watch as though it has the answer.

“I met McGucket.” You don’t know why you feel the need to tell him this, but you do want to address his memory issue that McGucket alluded to earlier.

“Oh.” He drops his gaze from his watch. He pushes his glasses up his nose and crosses his arms in front of his chest. Its almost like he’s hugging himself.

“He said something about you getting confused about things again?” You twirl the pen in your fingers, absentmindedly.

He watches your hand, speaking at it more than to you. “Sometimes I work too hard, for too long.”

“Maybe you should go to sleep.”

“There’s much to do. Too much to do.” He offers you a small smile, but you can tell how forced it is. It doesn’t reach his eyes.

“It is easier to do better work when you’re well rested,” you counter. You sit up straighter in your seat. You’re holding the pen long ways in both hands now. “And it would probably improve your mood.”

He looks from your hands to your face. His dark gaze meets your eyes and you study his: a kind of honey-brown, almost golden tinge to them. 

“Its…hard…for me to sleep sometimes,” he shifts his gaze from you and pads over to the sink to get a glass of water. He brings it over to the kitchen table to sit with you. He wraps his hand around the glass, but does not drink.

“Probably because you have irregular sleeping patterns from staying up til God knows when and—”

“I have bad dreams,” he cuts you off and steels his gaze towards you. “And unless you have great advice on how to get rid of those, I suppose I’m just going to continue having this mood. My apologies.”

You say nothing to this.

“I see you’re not short on critiques,” he says as he pulls your binder to himself to read over what you’ve written. “You have very fine penmanship.”

You chuckle at this. “Thank you?” You tilt your head to look at it. “Did you do the drawings I’ve seen in here?”

“Yes, I’ve drawn all my life.”

“They’re very neat and detailed.”

He looks taken aback at this, but gives you a real smile this time. “Thank you.”

You pull the binder back to yourself and go through more pages. You mark up some more things, crossing out their bad grammar. He sits back in his chair and watches you work.

“Say, you gonna be up for much longer?” You want to know.

“Probably so,” he licks at his lips before nibbling slightly at the bottom one. He cups both hands around his glass of water.

“Could you give me a ride back to my mother’s house?” You ask this meekly, and then say rapidly. “I hate to impose, but I don’t want to wake McGucket to ask him, and my mother will probably have a bird if I don’t come home tonight.”

A smirk tugs at the corner of his mouth. “You’re a grown woman.”

You roll your eyes. “I know. But still. She always needs to know where I am, what I’ve been doing.”

“Sounds a bit controlling. You shouldn’t let family hold you back, or run your life. Sometimes its just easier to get away from all that.”

“It was nice being in college, having my own place.” You offer him a small smile as you close the black binder. You want to tell him its not that easy. That it’s a bit difficult to move out when you don’t have any money.

“Well, you know. If you ever want to get away, we have that space up in the attic. Especially on nights like this where it’s late and cold. But if you really want to go home, I’ll take you now.”

\--

The night has made the Jeep cold and uncomfortable. His car window is jammed and won’t roll all the way up. You’ve secretly tried for the past ten minutes. It’s not wide open, but it’s cracked enough that is keeping you cold. You’re now partially wishing you’d taken him up on his offer to stay in the cabin. Even the attic would be warmer than this.

“It’s something about the little crank,” he tells you, like he could read your mind in that moment. “Won’t go any lower or higher than that,” he says.

“I see.”

You don’t know what to make of the way he holds himself while driving. While not thin now (and not heavy, either), he holds onto himself like he’s frail and frigid. He has his right arm is crossed over his chest, hand cupping his left bicep while he steers with his left hand. When he uses the gearstick, he delicately removes his right hand from its place and switches in a fluid motion. 

“Is this radio station fine? Do you like something else?” He is rigid and won’t look at you.

“It’s fine,” You tell him. The air blows in through the window’s crack and touches your face and freezes your watery eyes. You sniffle and look over at him. He smiles again.

“I can change it if you like. I know jazz isn’t for everyone.”

“You worry too much.”

“I just want you to be comfortable,” he mumbles and reaches for the temperature knob at the same time as you and your hands touch. 

You both jerk your hands back and he drives now with both of his on the steering wheel, gripping it slightly. The ride back to your house is in silence.

“That’s it just up there, next to the one on the corner,” you point and he nods. 

He pulls up into your mother’s driveway so you don’t have to walk far.

“Thank you, Dr. Pines.”

“Anytime.” And this time he does look at you, and you really wish you had spent the night after all.

You get out of the Jeep and walk over to the house’s side door.

“Hey,” he says, shoulder pressed into the door as he turns the window crank.

“Yeah?”

“Call me Ford. Please.”

You smile, “Good night, Ford.”

“Good night, Y/N.”

 

\--

You can never remember the lock turning this loudly in all the time you lived in this house. But it goes off like a gunshot in the night and you wince, cringing as you turn around. 

Your mother is sitting at the kitchen table with a low light on. She’s in her house coat and slippers. Once you’re facing her, she pushes herself to her feet, wrapping her coat tightly around herself. She is in your face in two long strides.

“Where have you been?” She demands this through gritted teeth.

“I told you I was starting my new job today.”

“You have been gone since eight o’clock this morning! It is almost one in the morning! No job is that hard on you. Who was that man I saw dropping you off just now? You know the neighbors saw him, too. I just bet they did, and they’ll be asking me about him in the morning!”

“That was my boss!” You felt your face flush with indignation. “You know I don’t have a car! I needed a ride home.”

She purses her lips and walks over to the windows to make sure no one is watching or looking in. “And he couldn’t bring you back any sooner?”

“I guess time just got away from us.”

“Working?” She shakes her head and shrugs her shoulder in a very passive aggressive way that makes you want to scream. “Just ‘working’, then.”

“Yes.”

“And I guess he doesn’t have a phone at his house that you could have called me to let me know you were going to be home late?” She crosses her arms against her chest and taps her foot impatiently. “I’ve been up all night worried sick.”

‘No you weren’t,’ you think. ‘You just want to know what I was doing. You can’t stand it that I was off doing something that you are clueless about.’

“I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.” You say as you head back to your room.

\--

But it does happen again. 

For about a week, Ford drives you home each night, and it is always after midnight. The drives are still nearly silent, his favorite jazz station being the only sound, along with the wind seeping in through the cracked window that he promises he’s going to try to fix soon.

Your mother gives you the same song and dance every time you come home. You tell Ford this and the next time you go into work, he tells you that he and McGucket have moved a bed into the attic for you.

“It’s yours if you want it,” Ford tells you. 

He and McGucket say it’s important for you to have a stress-free and conflict-free living situation. That they’re just worried about the quality of work you’re putting out and these silly, pointless fights with your mother are distracting you from doing your job.

You don’t believe that’s the only reason they’ve offered you the attic.

\--

That Friday, you’ve nearly finished collecting small decriptions of one project in the binder that has been scattered over hundreds of pages. You have been working on edits for this all day. Ford is sleeping on the couch and you’ve peeked in to check on him every so often. The two of you bicker and have heated moments. Most of the time, he’s very upset over the many critiques that the binder needs. You’ve ended up having a shouting match over it before, too.

It’s easier spending time with McGucket. Even though he looks weary most of the time, he’s very sweet and easy to talk to. He’s not too fond of the many critiques, but he takes them in stride and understands what you’re saying. He also makes sure that you get enough to eat and that you remember to drink water throughout the day.

McGucket has spent the better part of the afternoon working on the car outside. Every time you’ve taken a writing break, you’ve gone to a window to watch him outside with his tools. You’re sure he’ll be able to fix it. He’s an engineer, after all. 

‘If he can’t fix it, I’ll actually have to spend the night,’ you think to yourself and can’t help but smile. Truth be told, the two of them are the nicest to you in town.

Everyone’s been really weird and cool towards you ever since you moved back. The neighbors are giving you a hard time, too. Susan, the waitress at the diner, said something to your mother about ‘that damn Jeep coming in all hours of the morning and waking every singe one of us’. It was horse shit, really. But it was enough to get your mother fired up—she had never been on the receiving end of gossip and she did not relish this. She has taken to reading through the newspaper, looking for new jobs for you. She’s even thinking of subscribing to newspapers from Portland in hopes that you can get a job up there.

“With your level of education, you need to be in a big city,” she said one night.

“If it weren’t for that damned Stanford Pines, I’d still be on good terms with Susan, and you could get a job with her at the diner until you can move back to Portland,” she said another night.

You sigh deeply as you continue to stare out the window.

McGucket catches you looking at him during this break and he offers you a crooked grin and waves grandly with his entire arm. You roll your eyes and walk away, but not before catching him smiling, amused at himself no doubt, and returning to his own work.

You look at Ford, who is still sleeping on the couch. He’s wearing heather gray sweatpants. His black t-shirt has ridden up in his sleep and you see dark hair sprinkled all across his abdomen. One of his arms is draped over his head. His glasses are askew on his face. You can just see him rolling over and smashing them against the arm of the couch. 

You reach down and take his glasses off, folding them, and placing them on the end table. You pull the throw blanket up to his chest, and head back to the kitchen. You pour another cup of coffee and sit down to read some more. 

It’s almost sunset when McGucket comes back inside, sloppy oil all the way past his elbows. He goes to take his knit hat off, but you get up from the table and offer to help him so he doesn’t get it dirty.

"Let me get that for you." You stand on the tips of your toes to reach for it and tug it off. 

His dark golden locks tumble free and he shakes his head, trying to get the sweaty clumps off of his forehead and out of his eyes. You press your palm against his forehead and push it back. His skin is damp, but flushed and warm. You grip at his scalp gently and give a playful tug.

He smiles down at you before heading over to the sink. You help and turn both the cold and hot faucet handles to make it warm enough.

"Sonofabitchin' piece a junk." He holds his cupped hands together and you squirt a fistful of dish soap into them.

"What’s wrong with it?" You lean your back against the counter beside the sink and face him.

"Dang transmission is shot, it seems,” he scrubs briskly. The oil is coming off fast.

You’ve never owned a car before, and you’re not sure what this means. You tell him that sounds awful.

He smiles wanly at you, "Thanks, darlin'. Always somethin’ goin’ on with that dang ole thing. I should’ve taken better care of it before puttin’ all those miles on it. I’m not real good at doin’ things sometimes,” he chuckles at you and averts his eyes, embarrassed. “Its amazing I’m here at all, honestly."

"You didn’t have too far to drive, did you?" You feel alarm tighten around your chest at this recklessness.

He takes a moment before answering that no not really. Just outside of town was all. 

You know he’s fibbing, but you don’t say anything. He asks for his hat back, but you shove it on your own head and scamper off, telling him if he wants it, he needs to catch up.

You run into Stanford in the sitting room, who is now standing and rubbing at his temples. He stops you with his chest and you both stumble, but he puts his hands on your biceps to steady you both. He plucks the hat off your head and tosses it to McGucket. “I told you, dear. Its hard to sleep in this house.”

-

The first time you hear someone talking about the guys is in the library of all places. You thought this kind of gossip was meant for barbershops or the hushed aisles of the grocery store.

You were actually getting really into working for Dr. Pines—er, Ford, but needed to reference how to properly cite materials and format pages to submit for grant writing. It was a little bit of a different style than you were used to. You’d gone to check out the latest edition of the MLA handbook until McGucket could get the Cherokee debacle straightened out and drive to the bookstore in the city. He offered to walk into town with you this afternoon. He wanted to mail off your first proposal at the post office while you looked for your book.

You are browsing down the reference section when you hear someone talking to one of the librarians. They weren’t exactly trying to be discreet, it seems. 

"Heard that they got a woman up there now. What do they need her for? Been here two years and did just fine until last week all a' sudden."

You peek around the corner and the man speaking looked like a farmer, chewing on a straw or something. His thumbs are tucked under the strap of his overalls.

"It isn’t that; I heard they’re broke and need some money.” The librarian is a young woman with long, dark hair and lots of make up.

"Don’t know what she’d be doing to help. Think she’s a banker or lawyer up from Portland?"

“No, that’s _________'s little girl. She didn’t go to college for all that."

"You’re kiddin'."

"I’m not."

The farmer type looks around, as though so many people were listening. He hushes his voice and leans in. "Heard from Preston Northwest that she’s been kinda shacking up with them."

"I don’t know about any of that. She can’t seem to find anything else to do with her time but stay up with them. She’s always coming into town with the weedy looking one. You know, that hillbilly?"

"Where’s he from? Kentucky?"

"Something like that.” The girl with the make up flips her hair in a flirtatious way.

You’ve long since found the book you are here for, and you hold it in your sweaty hand. 

"Yeah, I seen her down here with him, too. What you think she’s payin' for all their stuff now?"

"If she isn’t she will be soon. My mother always said there’s nothing worse than a man who doesn’t work, and that a woman has to take care of him instead.”

"Amen to that, Shandra. Don’t he have a wife and kid somewhere? The hillbilly?"

"That’s what I heard. But Preston Northwest told me that she came into town looking for him. She was about to drag his ass back home. She went to the cabin and stormed right out. I think they’re fitting to have a divorce."

"Still're legally married,” the farmer says in a tone that indicates ‘that is that’. “It ain’t right. Two men what ain’t bachelors no more livin' together like that. You don’t think they’re a couple'a those...you-knows?"

"I don’t know anything about that. I don’t think they are. Why else would you think ______'s little girl lets herself stay up there all the damn time?”

The farmer whistles lowly. “If her daddy was still alive...I hate to see what he’d do to those fellers or what he’d think of them."

"Come on now, she’s only been up there a week. Maybe she’ll be done with them soon.”

"You know she didn’t tell her mother their names or nothin' like that? Now she comes home all hours of the night and refuses to tell her mother what she been up to all day.” 

"It’s really a shame. Totally embarrassing for her mother."

You slam your book on the counter. "May I renew my library card please? Haven’t been here in a while. Guess I’ve been up in that cabin for too long."

Neither of them says anything. The farmer walks away walks away. The librarian, Shandra, does what you asked, but does it in silence, until you’re about to leave.

"You better leave them alone. Especially that married one. Something isn’t right about them." She gives you an absolutely fake sympathetic smile, as though she knew what was best for you.

"Its just a job. Don’t worry about me. And they aren’t terrible people. Just very private, is all."

You didn’t even need to say that to her, but you could tell she wasn’t going to let you get away in peace. There’s a small piece of you that hopes this answer appeases her in some way to where she (and hopefully others) won’t think about you anymore. But perhaps it would get worse now. 

You think to go visit your mother, but McGucket is waiting for you outside. He walks up to you smiling brightly on this dreadful and muddy snow day. He offers you a warm, steaming paper cup. 

“I wanted to apologize for not preparin' the percolator this morning.”

“That’s very sweet, Hadron; you didn't have to do that.”

“Wanted to.” He takes your book from under your arm and carries it for you, “When’s this due back?”

“I wasn’t paying attention.” You surprise yourself with how short you are with him. That’s an answer worthy of a conversation you’d have with Ford.

“Well, I suppose there’s a stamp somewhere in here to tell ya.” He grins down at you and pushes his glasses up his long nose. The tip of it is flushed pink from the cold.

You don’t say anything in response. 

You walk through the downtown area with McGucket standing just a little too close to you. You come up on a mountain of plowed snow and he offers you his hand to help steady yourself and to help you clamber over the top if it. You mutter a pink-eared thanks. 

But by the time you make it near Greasy's Diner, there’s a patch of black ice you don’t see and you fall forwards, flailing your arms and letting out a terrified sound—  
you’ve never broken anything on yourself before and you don’t want to start now. 

McGucket wraps his arms around your waist and pulls you into his chest. Instead of steadying you or himself, he falls backwards into the pile of snow you just so carefully climbed over. You roll yourself off of him to lie shoulder to shoulder.

He laughs, breathless, adjusting his glasses on his face once more. "I don’t think I ever knew a more graceful woman.” He pushes himself to lay on his side and stares down at you. “You all right, darlin'?" 

"I—no."

"You hurt?" He looks immediately alarmed and takes your face gingerly into his chilly hands, peering over your face in an attempt to check for wounds.

"I’m fine."

"But you just said-" You push yourself up into a sitting position. McGucket shifts to his knees and shakes his head. "I don’t understand."

"They were talking about you. Me, us, Ford. In the library. And now all this,” you gesture to your current state with exasperation. “I’m sure its playing right into their fucked up fantasies about what we’re doing up in the cabin."

"What’re we doing?" He bites at his lower lip after wetting it with the tip of his tongue. He inhales deeply. "Research? Work? Drinking coffee for chrissake? Fixin’ the car? Havin’ a laugh every day?"

"They said you’re married."

It seemed to be some kind of blow to him; he sits back further from you. "Well, hell. Can’t keep nothin’ under wraps around here. For their information and for your own, she left me before I even moved here to be with Stanford." He pushes himself up to his feet and offers you his hand. He yanks you up but doesn’t let you go. "She got my signed papers months ago. She’s up here askin’ about money."

"Then they’re just…" By ‘they’, you meant the town.

"Bored and needin' somethin to talk about to make themselves feel more important. And you never answered my question: what are we doing?" He raises his eyebrows at you expectantly.


	3. Memory and Desire, Stirring

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the reader is met with haters again; Preston joins the party; Ford's identity is mistaken again; and the reader spends the evening with Ford.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “What shall I do now? What shall I do?”   
> “I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street   
> “With my hair down, so. What shall we do tomorrow?   
> “What shall we ever do?”   
>  The hot water at ten.   
> And if it rains, a closed car at four.   
> And we shall play a game of chess,   
> Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door.  
> -T.S. Eliot, ‘II, A Game of Chess’ The Waste Land

\--

 

There’s something charged and electrical in the way he asks you. There’s something restrained behind his eyes and he looks desperate, almost longing, waiting for you to say something.

 

You squeeze his hand and he offers you a small smile (one that says something like ‘I know’) before he starts walking again. You’re not sure what it is that he knows (or if he knows anything at all), but sometimes you get the impression that he understands things about you before you can even recognize them yourself. That he knows all the stories you haven’t even had a chance to formulate and tell him about.

 

‘Something is happening, something is coming’ is all you can think about in this moment.

 

Its like something is keeping half of you rooted in one mindset and he could pull you right into the next one. One that rejects expectations and all the ‘right’ milestones and passages we are told that we go through in life. The ‘right’ way of living and the ‘right’ way of having relationships. You are in the state of becoming something else, _someone_ else, but…

 

No.

 

Not yet. You aren’t ready.

 

McGucket wants to tell you something about this, or maybe he wants you to say something about this and that’s what those looks were for. But whatever this is, whatever you’re all doing, whatever this cusp is that you’re on…he isn’t the one to bring you to the other side.

 

It must be Ford.

 

Ford is the one to bring you over to the other side. ‘The other side of what?’ You ask yourself. You know you must look like you’re slipping into a strange state, some kind of madness, with the different facial expressions passing your way so quickly.

 

‘To where you want to be,’ a voice tickles the back of your mind in response. The voice that tells you your desires but you always ignore it because you’re too afraid to upset other people.

 

It must be Ford, you are so sure. And maybe it isn’t you who gets to decide this. Maybe this is the way it is supposed to be. McGucket is too different from Ford—he isn’t the type to make any kind of move. He won’t put you to task and hasn’t tested your mettle in the way that Ford has, however minute these tests and challenges have been.

 

You should have kissed Fiddleford then, but you don’t realize that until much later. There’s something you feel about both of these men and it grips at your heart and makes your chest heavy. Its like you need air, but your lungs continue to deny you.

 

Its like you need to tell them something, do something to them to show them that you appreciate them. But then again you tell yourself; they’re your only friends, even though that word has never been tossed around. Perhaps this feeling is just platonic, friendly affection?

 

‘Yes,’ you tell yourself. ‘Friends care about one another. That’s all this is.’

 

And friends show each other how they feel about one another…right?

 

But friends don’t hold hands the whole way back home, either…right?

 

\--

 

It is the middle of the afternoon when you get back to the cabin and Ford is still laying on the couch, but reading. He looks up from his book and at the two of you when you come inside. He and McGucket share an entire conversation in one shared look and McGucket drops his hand away from yours. You can still feel the warmth against your palm for the rest of the day.

 

McGucket heads to the kitchen, muttering something about starting a fresh thing of coffee.

 

When he is gone, Ford looks at you for a long time.

 

“Hello,” you manage to stammer out and go to sit on the couch because you don’t know what to do with yourself.

 

Ford doesn’t say anything, and looks at you over the tops of his knees. He extends his legs to rest them in your lap. He rests his book face down on his chest to keep his place marked and lays his hands on top of his book. You absentmindedly place a palm onto one of his shins. He looks at your hand for a long time.

 

“Its getting colder,” is all he says.

 

“Yeah.”

 

“The Jeep still isn’t fixed.”

 

“It’sapieceofshit!” McGucket shrieks from the other room, all one word, all defensive. You can just see his cheeks turning as pink as the tip of his nose.

 

You and Ford bite back laughs, grinning at one another and shaking from holding it all in. You both try really hard not to burst into giggles (even silent giggles) over the slew of loud profanities and southern slang gibberish that McGucket is spewing from the kitchen.

 

“There’s a storm coming, too,” Ford tells you once you’ve both settled down. He’s keeping his voice level, casual. Almost apathetic.

 

“Thought I heard someone say something about that in the library.” You’re afraid to tell Ford about what you really heard at the library. And you’re also trying to treat this casually. You know he wants you to stay (he acts like this every night that he takes you home) and you can’t stand it that he won’t say it.

 

“Well, I was thinking about heading into town to pick up a few necessities. Bread, milk. Just so we don’t starve. We shouldn’t lose power, with that generator that F made.” Ford nods his head into a vague direction as though you knew the generator was a thing and where it is. “We can walk you partway home on our way to the store if you like.”

 

You exhale softly, annoyed over his offer. You don’t want to respond to this, so you push yourself up from the couch and head to the kitchen, mumbling something about wanting to get some more work done before you have to leave.

 

“We’ll go in a couple’a hours, then,” McGucket says softly from the sink, drying now-clean coffee cups with a dishtowel.

 

\--

 

 

McGucket has cleaned up the Remington typewriter so it works much more smoothly, and the new ink ribbons are in abundance.

 

Stanford has gone over the notes you’d given him and made the proper revisions. You sit at the kitchen table in what everyone understands as your chair. The stack of handwritten revisions is at your right and you are clanging away on the typewriter. You’re typing very hard, but don’t stop your frustrations—the sound and feel of you pressing down hard is satisfying and almost cathartic.

 

You keep your gaze on the paper to type up his words, cleaning it up as you go along. 

 

Ford is watching you, mesmerized at how well you can type without looking at the keyboard, and with little to no typing error. He is supposed to be drawing fresh sketches onto sheets of crisp graph paper. He is adjusting his drawing compass to the correct angles as he watches you. He balances his plastic protractor on his thick thigh. The short pencil keeps slipping out of its place in the compass and he fiddles with that absentmindedly. You look up from time to time and lock eyes with him because he hasn’t looked away yet. You feel your face heat up when he finally presses his face close to his graph paper, counting out lines and squares and then draws lines with a steady hand.

 

McGucket is at the table with a kind of pair of work goggles on his face, but they aren’t true laboratory goggles. Instead, they remind you of the kind of monocular that jewelry professionals wear when they need to look at something closely, only there’s two of them and the glass of the lenses are tinted green. He told you that he made these himself. He is hunched over a slab of metal that takes over an entire half of the kitchen table. Wires and things are dangling off of it, and his nose is almost pressed into the metal. A strange screwdriver is in a gloved hand. He calls the hunk of metal a motherboard, whatever that means, and he says that he’s making something that you could type documents on.

 

“Kinda like a personal computer,” he explains when you give him a confused look. “Very tiny. Could fit right on this table.”

 

“Impossible,” Ford scoffs and rolls his eyes. “Waste of time, my boy.”

 

“You just wait, Stanford. I’m fittin ta make me a computer the size of a suitcase or smaller.”

 

“You won’t.” Ford says this in a light, sing-song type of voice and you can’t contain the small giggle filled with mirth from escaping out of your throat.

 

McGucket just waves him off and gives you a bashful look. You give him an apologetic smile for indulging in Ford’s teasing.

 

There’s a knock at the door and you all look up from your separate projects and stare at each other.

 

McGucket takes his strange green glasses and pushes them on top of his head. “Should we get that?"

 

“We didn’t order anything to eat did we?” Ford wants to know.

 

“Hardon said he was cooking tonight,” you mutter, frowning. You rest your palm on the typewriter’s keyboard and keep a watchful eye turned towards the sitting room.

 

“Go see who it is, my dear” Ford says to you, then smiles at McGucket in a way that says ‘watch this’.

 

He grins back and chides you, “Yeah go see, darl.”

 

You’re too flustered over their nicknames for you. Since your third day or so, you have exclusively been ‘my dear’ to Ford (as McGucket is ‘my boy’ to him). You were ‘darlin’ or ‘darl’ to McGucket instantly.

 

You get up from the table and go into the sitting room, toward the front door. You look back at them in the threshold between the kitchen and sitting room. McGucket has his hands on his hips and Ford is chewing at the tip of his thumb. Ford makes a shooing kind of motion, meant for you to answer the knocking which has turned heavier and impatient, strained.

 

You open the door and an impudent groan escapes you.

 

It is your mother.

 

“Toby said you dropped this outside of the diner.” She has your library book in one gloved hand. Her cheeks are flushed either from the cold or the angry exhilaration of coming up to the cabin. “He said you were too busy fooling around and so ready to get back to this..this _sex house_ that you didn’t dare try to pick this book up lest you ruin the heat of the moment!”

 

That is _so_ Toby. All sensationalism.

 

Your jaw drops and you feel her press the book into one of your hands. Your grip tightens around it and turns angry. Before you can say anything, she goes on,

 

“Toby thought that it would be so much more _delicious_ to bring it over to me instead of taking it back to the library. Y/N, I told you how much of a problem your little job has become. Please come home.” She goes to grab your free hand and tug you outside. Your socked foot meets a damp pile of old snow and you shiver. The brisk wind whips at your face. You shrink back into the house.

 

“Y./N, this is a _filthy hovel._ I don’t want you here anymore!” She yells this and you flinch.

 

“Its not filthy. They just have too much stuff!” It’s the only thing you can think to say and you think it sounds so stupid once it’s out of your mouth.

 

“Pardon me, ma’am. But this is my cabin and it is neither a hovel nor what you so fondly refer to as a sex house.” Ford’s authoritative tone breaks through the sounds of the howling wind and you mother’s angry panting over her shouting that has so obviously overexerted her. Even her usually immaculate hair has fallen out of place.

 

You look in their direction and see Ford has come up behind you. He rests his hand on your shoulder. You see your mother’s eyes immediately fly to his and not just because he’s touching you. Disgust takes over her countenance in waves.

 

You see Fiddleford has moved further into the living room, but he is wringing his hands and frowning. It looks like he wants to say something, but is also holding back. You learned quickly enough that he is not one for confrontations if he can help it—he has a very avoidant personality at times, as does Ford. However, Ford has no problems with confrontations.

 

“Who are you? Why are you in Gravity Falls?” Your mother asks Ford. Her eyes are glistening, and there is a quaver of desperation in her voice. “Why do you need her?”

 

“She does good work, and she is good for us.”

 

“Yes,” McGucket clears his throat and comes further into the room. “I don’t like seein’ her gettin’ here in the morning all quiet and gloomy because you kep’ her up all night with yer yellin’.” He doesn’t meet anyone’s eyes. He just speaks quietly, eyeing his feet.

 

“It wouldn’t be this way if you,” your mother jabs her finger into Ford’s chest. He looks down at it, a wildfire dancing behind his bronze eyes, “didn’t bring her home all hours of the night. You have no idea how hard all of this has been on me.”

 

“If we were doing what you and everyone else thinks we are, why does everyone care so much? Why is this a problem?” You need to know because it has been absurd since you’ve gotten home and since you’ve spent time with them.

 

“They think you are their sex doll!” Your mother screeches, and birds fly off of a tree somewhere to the left. “They think you’re all _together._ It isn’t right, it isn’t the natural way of having relationships!”

 

The wind howls stronger as the three of you stand silent, you in the middle of the guys.

 

McGucket actually lifts his head. This next part is almost whispered, but it resonates with how you feel currently, and how you’ve felt about her since childhood. “You treat her cruelly…ma’am.”

 

“Cruel? _Cruel?_ I only want what’s best for you!” Your mother’s shoulders slump in a defeated way. But you know this old trick. “Do you really think so poorly about me? About your own mother?”

 

“I’m sorry,” you say. But you aren’t. “I can’t go back with you. I’m staying here for the weekend.”

 

McGucket and Ford look at each other over the top of your head and then at your mother.

 

Before she can say anything else, Ford says, “I’m going to have to ask you to leave. This is my property—all of this out here—and at this point, you’re just trespassing and harassing.”

 

“You can’t _do_ this. She can’t—”

 

“She can do whatever she wants. She is an adult. She can leave whenever she wants.” He chuckles in spire of himself. “We don’t make her do anything…anything.”

\--

 

None of you return to your work once your mother leaves and nobody says anything about what happened. Instead you all quietly put your outer clothes on and decide to go to the store before it gets too late and before the evening storm comes.

 

You discuss the type of food you want to make over the weekend.

 

“We can’t eat pasta every night, F!” Ford throws his hands up in the air as the three of you come into town, passing the diner.

 

“Why the hell not?” You ask indignantly.

 

“Well, I tell you what, Stanford Pines.” McGucket looks at Ford over his glasses. “You can get some bologna, some cheese, some bread. And Y/N and I’ll have a delicious, carb-ridden feast.”

 

“But for three nights?!” Ford is aghast over this and looks at you for help on this one. “The same food for three nights?!”

 

“Sorry, Ford. I can’t agree with you on this one.”

 

Ford gives you a gentle push on your shoulder and you stumble forward a bit, laughing.

 

“But seriously, what should we stock up on?” You want to know. “Won’t the store be empty by now? We should have gone earlier.”

 

“Oh, we’re just going to Ma’s and Pa’s.” Ford said reassuringly. “Most people don’t think to go in there, so on days like this, it’s easier to find things.”

 

“Bit more expensive,” McGucket sniffs in disdain over this, but says no more.

 

You come up to a small building with neon lights and ol-timey signs that call it the Dusk 2 Dawn.

 

“Eerie name,” you mumble as Ford holds the door open and you go inside.

 

“Let’s split up and go down the aisles. Just pick up things you think you may want,” Ford instructs.

 

McGucket heads to get milk and bread and by the time you make it to the aisle that has pasta, McGucket and Ford are together again at the other end of the aisle.

 

You scan the surprisingly good selection of pasta before spotting the winner.

 

It’s the bowtie shaped kind and you’re thrilled. The last time you made this, McGucket had reached into the colander and held one up to his shirt, where an actual bow tie would have been, and spoke in a posh accent, following you around the kitchen and narrated what you were doing. This tickled Ford and he immediately followed suit, but he wasn’t as good as doing the voice. He was terrible at it.

 

"Do they keep you warm at night?" A voice asks from behind you, breaking you out of your reverie, as you stretch on the tips of your toes to reach for one of the last boxes of bow tie pasta. 

 

Your smile fades as your fingers curl around the box and you bring it down and hold it against your chest as though it were a valued prize.

 

You ask without turning around, a soft, "Excuse me?" It’s almost a whisper. 

 

The person behinds you steps closer and you swear you feel their breath on the back of your neck. "They keep you warm at night, don’t they? The both of them at the same time. What is that like?"

 

You glance at the end of the aisle where Ford and McGucket are bickering over pasta sauce. Ford has a jar in each hand and he looks irate. He is talking passionately about one, shaking it in his hand for emphasis, and McGucket has one hand on his hip and the other pinching the bridge of his nose, shaking his head vehemently.

 

Ford is impassioned and shakes the jar so hard that he drops it and it crashes to the ground. The sound is deafening to you. Some people stop to watch. Ford and McGucket look down at the mess, at each other, and then to you sheepishly. McGucket waves uselessly. Ford’s hand flies to the back of his neck and gives a crooked grin.

 

"You don’t know what you’re talking about," you mumble to the man.

 

“Imbeciles,” he breathes.

 

You turn to face him.

 

He’s a tall, fit man, probably closer to your age instead of Ford’s and McGucket’s. His hair is dark and wavy, but slicked back. There are Ray Ban aviator sunglasses pushed onto his head. He’s dressed in a pastel pink button-down shirt, navy Benetton puffer vest and a heavy jacket with the tag that says Patagonia. His khaki pants are cuffed over a pair of L. L. Bean duck hunting boots. He’s most likely never been hunting in all his life, or mountain climbing, yet here he is swaddled in expensive gear.

 

This is the brattiest looking grown person you have ever seen in your life.

 

“I’ve heard their experiments are dangerous,” the brat says carefully, watching the two of them scramble to pick up shards of glass. “But, as with all geniuses, it appears they lack the sense to safely navigate throughout the real world.”

 

“The same can be said for people born with silver spoons in their mouths.” You’re surprised at how easy this comes out. Again, talking to new people. Never easy.

 

“You’d be surprised.” He says this indignantly and glares at you. “What is it that you do for them? Can you tell me about that house? What is in it? Dirty little shack full of secrets?”

 

“Research. Writing. Very boring.” It is anything but.

 

“No doubt its something freaky. The man has twelve fingers for chrissake. But,” he smiles nastily down at you. “I’m sure you know all about those.”

 

“Fuck off.” You go to walk away from him, but his hand is on your shoulder in a split second and he’s steering you to look at him again. “I know they need money. Funnily enough, I never seem to run out of it. I can offer you some if you give me some of those papers.”

 

“What do you need them for? Why do you care about their work?”

 

Preston’s emerald gaze cuts from you and flickers to Ford walking towards you. McGucket flags down a worker to apologize and help clean up the glassy mess. 

 

"Preston." Ford says this through a tight-lipped greeting.

 

"Pines." 

 

"You all right Y/N?" Ford asks gazing at you intently. You just nod. He gently pries the box of pasta out of your hands, his thumb brushing against the back of your hand affectionately. "Come on."

 

"You don’t know what you’re getting yourself into, Y/N" Preston calls after you. "All these years these…gentlemen…have been in town, no one’s been allowed into that shack, and now all of a sudden, you come home, and they let you in almost immediately.”

 

You just walk on as Ford presses his hand into your lower back prompting you to walk away. McGucket has finished cleaning up the mess.

 

"Stanford knows I do not care for onions, yet he insisted on that,” he points to where the mess was, grimacing at it. "How d’you feel about mushrooms, darlin?" 

 

Your mouth is dry and your lips are numb. You want to tell him that you don’t mind mushrooms at all and if that’s what he wants, then he should get it.

 

He furrows his brow and gently catches your chin, tracing the front of it with the pad of his thumb. He tilts your head up and searches your face. His intense blue eyes gaze down at you. "You all right?"

 

"Its that guy back there.” You turn to look at Ford and Preston. 

 

McGucket hand falls to your shoulder and he squeezes softly. "Fuckin prick. Pardon my language, darl."

 

Preston is taller than Ford and sneers down at him. You can’t hear what he’s saying to him but you know Ford isn’t taking his shit. Ford leans towards Preston and jabs him in the chest with an extended finger. Preston sneers again and goes to wipe the front of his shirt. He reaches into his vest and pulls out a checkbook, writes something on it, and shoves it into Ford’s chest.

 

Ford rips up the check into tiny pieces and throws the pieces into Preston’s face.

 

“What is that about?” You want to know.

 

“Don’t want his money,” McGucket says simply, as thought he’s saying ‘that is that’. “He’s been tryin’ to get into our place since it was built. See him on the property sometimes.”

 

“He offered to buy the cabin.” Ford frowns when he joins you again.

 

“Why?” You’re frowning now, too, watching Preston leave the store.

 

“Thinks he can own the whole town, I suppose. Come on, let’s get the hell out of here.” Ford leads you to the check out counter.

 

Two elderly people are chitchatting with one another. You assume this is Ma and Pa.

 

“Ho, ho,” Pa laughs, taking your groceries and ringing them up with a clacky adding machine. “Looky here, Ma. He’s come back.” Pa straightens his bifocals on his face.

 

“So he has,” Ma looks at Ford appraisingly. “Have money this time?”

 

“I, um. Yes?” Ford raises an eyebrow at you and McGucket. McGucket shrugs.

 

“Got a haircut and new jacket, too. That red one was just too ratty. Poor thing.” Ma frowns at Ford, but looks at his hair approvingly. “Don’t remember you wearing glasses last time.”

 

Red jacket? You remember this. Someone who looks like Ford, with a red jacket. Ford holding the paper coffee cup the first day you met him, seeming familiar.

 

“You must be confused.” And Ford is just as clipped as he was the time that you accused him of being someone else.

 

 

\--

 

The storm brings another foot of snow, but the cabin is warm.

 

McGucket got his way with making a nice pesto pasta tonight. They didn’t play with the bow tie noodles and you were slightly disappointed. But their moods were significantly different after the meeting with Preston and probably weren’t in a playing mood. However, you’re far more certain that the interaction Ford had with Ma is what upset him more than Preston trying to buy him off or even your mother inviting herself to his house earlier today.

 

The three of you retreat into the living room after dinner. Ford starts a fire in the fireplace next to the television that is covered in pieces of paper taped to the screen and stacks of books on the top of it. Ford and McGucket are sitting in the floor, a game of chess on the rickety old coffee table.

 

Ford is hugging a pillow to his stomach. His free hand planted on his thigh. McGucket has his elbow on the table with his cheek resting in it. You are curled up in the yellow, saggy armchair near the table, reading a novel. Ford’s back is against the front of the chair. You stop reading from time to time and look at the top of his head and his fluffy locks.

 

McGucket sighs in a deep, frustrated manner when he loses the game. “About time to go check on it, anyway.” He says this more to himself, but it doesn’t stop you from closing your book on your thumb and gently demand to know what he’s talking about. What ‘it’ is.

 

“You’ll see soon enough,” Ford says this solemnly, tilting his head back to look at your upside down.

 

McGucket goes to the lab. You’re surprised that even he hasn’t shown you this place yet, but perhaps they would eventually show you like Ford said. They said it was dangerous, after all, and maybe you really didn’t need to be down there.

 

But the mystery and curiosity is killing you and you now know what Preston must feel like experiencing that burning desire to have knowledge of something seemingly so deliciously forbidden.

 

You and Ford migrate to the sofa with a book apiece. Hours pass and McGucket is still gone. The fire is still going strong.

 

He stands up and jostles the cushions and pillows around and when he sits back down you are shoulder to shoulder with him. Your heart skips a beat and you focus more intently on your book, reading the same sentence over and over.

 

He shifts closer and you do, too, unsure where this bravery has come from. Your heads are touching one another. It is impossible to read your book. He turns the pages on his own, but you have stared at the same paragraph for decades. You’re sure by now he isn’t reading either and it’s just a façade. You sit like this for what seems an eternity before you both nuzzle into one another at the same time, at first gently and then more ardently.

 

Your stomach has never dropped this low before in your life. He squirms and then his arm is around you, pulling you into him, into the hollow of his neck. You press your nose into it and inhale deeply. Your sigh tickles at his neck. His own sigh sounds like a slight grunt, rumbling in his chest. You flush. He crosses one leg over the other in the way people say is for women and you find it endearing.

 

He wraps the throw blanket around you and mumbles, “You sleep if you feel like it, okay?” His hand is on the back of your head and strokes, his thumb lingering at the nape of your neck. He cups the back of your free hand in his big and warm hand. Then his arm is around your shoulders again. He is a deep breather.

 

“You smell nice.” You don’t care if you meant to keep this to yourself and you can’t stop. “You always smell nice.” You press your cold nose onto his neck.

He presses his nose into your hair. “Not true.” He grabs your hand with his free arm and drags it across his chest and lets go. You turn slightly sideways and draw your legs onto the couch, pressing the side of one onto his leg and hug yourself into his embrace. “Go to sleep.”

 

You do drift, but it is a light kind of sleep and it is lucid. At some point, his free arm creeps on top of your own arm that is stretched out across his chest, and rests on top of it. His cheek rests on the crown of your head. His other hand hasn’t stopped tracing lines on your ear or paths down your neck and onto your shoulder.

 

“What is that sound?” You ask, sleepy, feigning it is the noise from outside that is keeping you awake and not the fear of missing out of anything happening in this moment.

 

“Its ice…. Come on, I wish to show you something.” He lets go of you and stands up, holding his hand out to help you get up, too.

 

He walks you over to the vending machine. This is where you’ve seen them disappear from time to time and as much as you’ve wanted to ask what it is they use it for, you still haven’t asked. He punches in a code so quickly that you miss the order the buttons are supposed to go in. It swings out like a door and he pulls you inside an elevator.

 

“This is my private study,” he tells you when the doors open again. “I don’t think even Fiddleford knows about it. Well, he may know about it, but he wouldn’t know the code to get in.”

 

You want to ask why he would keep this from him, but now you understand that Stanford Pines is the type to keep a lot of important things from people he deems important to him.

 

Instead, you just take in the space in silence.

 

There are blank canvases lined against the walls and what looks like the start of a multipart mural.

 

“I thought I might like to pick up painting. There are some things I can’t get out of my head when I sleep.”

 

“Looks like you’re starting on the backgrounds first?”

 

“Yes.” He comes up beside you and clasps his hands behind his back. His elbow brushes against your arm. “”They’re going to line all of the back wall,” he extends an arm, palm facing the wall and sweeps his arm to the side. He looks down at you, an eyebrow raised, waiting for your opinion.

 

“Impressive.”

 

“Really?” He doesn’t seem to believe you.

 

“Very.” You know this is what he wants to hear, but it’s also true.

 

“Thank you.” He is pleased.

 

“What do those triangles mean on it?”

 

“I’m not sure yet. Its something that won’t leave me alone at night.” But, he was abrupt and you are sure he knows more than he’s letting on.

 

You take in the room. It’s very small and there’s a massive computer monitor on a long table, as well as several shelves full of books and skulls.

 

“I don’t spend as much time up here as I used to since I’ve taken up sleeping on the couch downstairs.”

 

“Not much room up here for anything, it seems.”

 

You just stand and look at each other for a few minutes. You get nervous and start fiddling with the front hem of your shirt.

 

He walks forward to you and you retreat until your lower back presses into the long table.

 

“Stanford…”

 

He leans himself to you, one of his legs pressed between your own to where you are straddling his thigh. You press a hand onto his chest and he covers it with his own and stares intently at you. His eyes are less golden now, more dark. 

 

“I’m not good at these things,” he confesses. This is the quietest you’ve ever heard him speak, and his deep and sometimes rough voice is gentle and soothing.

 

“Its okay,” you breathe out.

 

“Its been Fiddleford and I for so long. And there was only one other for me before that.” He brings your hand he’s holding up to his lips and kisses a short, tickling line to your palm and gives it a lingering kiss before brining your hand back to his chest.

 

Your heart is racing, you can hear the blood pumping in your ears, and you let out another breathless, “Its okay.”

 

You don’t know if by now you’re just trying to make yourself believe that everything is okay, that you’re trying to calm yourself. You’ve only had a small amount of boyfriends and none of them lasted beyond casual flings and one of them trying to get you into a friends with benefits type deal. 

 

Ford removes his hand from yours and cups your face in his hands. You turn your face and kiss one of his wrists. You look back up at him and feel yourself flush. His hands slide up, palms covering your ears and his thumbs brush the curve of the tops of them. He kisses your forehead and then presses his to yours. You wrap your arms around his waist and pull him flush against you.

 

He pulls his head back to look at you and traces the pad of his thumb across your lower lip before catching your face in his hands once more. He angles his face to press his nose against yours. He presses his lips to where his thumb outlined, catching your bottom lip between his own and kisses you slowly, but firmly. It is chaste, but his lips are warm and wetted (probably from his constant nervous tic of licking them), and you feel a heat pool in your belly when he pulls back a little before losing himself in the kiss when you kiss him back with more force.

 

Your hands leave his waist and your fingers grip at his hair, tugging gently at his soft locks. His hands move to your waist and his fingers slip under your shirt and caress delicate lines all over your lower back. You tremble from the slight tickle and your legs tighten around his thigh. He moans into your mouth before letting his tongue run a clumsy, shy line across your bottom lip. You catch his lower lip in your mouth and bite and suck at it until its swollen and he leaves sloppy kisses that make you cry out his name in a desperate moan full of desire and longing. You pull his hair hard and he kisses you slower, more gently, almost as though they are recovery kisses from the previous mess.

 

He kisses you once more, then moves to kiss your temple. He stays there, breathless, “I dream about you watching me sleep. I dream about having you…with me, constantly.”

 

You run soothing fingers through his hair and down his neck, cradling him to your chest. You want to tell him you think about him all the time, that you’ve dreamed about him, too, but can’t find your words.

 

His strong hands grip at your hips and he buries his face into your neck, leaving warm patches of breath behind kisses and he nips at the soft skin where the top of your jaw meets your earlobe. You tug the collar of his t-shirt down and kiss his chest, leaving nips of your own. The groan he lets out comes from somewhere deep that hasn’t been touched in a long time.

 

He withdraws from you and you almost whine from the loss of contact.

 

“Forgive me,” he straightens the glasses on his face. “I lost control of myself.”

 

“Hell, then I did, too.” You chuckle to make light of the tension.

 

His face is flushed and his hair is a mess. He smiles sweetly at you and looks almost innocent, and you want to rip his shirt off and attack him. Well, there are some secrets you can keep from him, too.

 

“We should get back downstairs,” he says lamely. “Fiddleford may be looking for us.”

 

\--

 

And McGucket _was_ looking for you. Because the cabin had company. A man in a ratty old red jacket who looks a hell of a lot like Ford, but with more hair and no glasses, and stubble covering his strong jawline.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm much more excited about what I have planned for the next part. Preston's desire to get into the cabin will come to light. Bill will be in the next part, as well, and Ford will go through some changes.


	4. Say You'll Never Let Me Go

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the reader meets Stan, attends the Northwest End-of-Winter Masquerade Gala, and smut happens.
> 
> Title is from 'Roses' by The Chainsmokers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “Oh, I'll be your daydream, I'll wear your favorite things  
> We could be beautiful  
> Get drunk on the good life, I'll take you to paradise  
> Say you'll never let me go”  
> -The Chainsmokers, ‘Roses’
> 
> \--  
> I apologize for any typos. I try really hard to comb through chapters before I post them, but they're so long that I don't catch them all, especially if Word doesn't have a squiggly line under them! I'll be more careful about this next time. I guess I just get hasty with posting the new chapters because I'm excited about them being done!

 

\--

"Yeesh, what happened to your face, Poindexter?" The man in the red hoodie breaks the silence when McGucket fails to introduce him to you and Ford.

 

Its obvious that McGucket doesn’t know who the stranger is, and that this is an unexpected visit because Ford pales when he sees his double; Ford looks like he has the potential to become violently ill or to throw something.

 

You look over at Ford and decide you both could have taken a few minutes to straighten yourselves out to look more presentable. While you were both impassioned and wrapped up with one another, he is the one who still wore the marks you left on him and he is still so much more flushed, as though he’d sprinted to the living room from somewhere far off in the woods. His t-shirt hangs stretched out and loose around his neck where you’d tugged at it so needily earlier, and there is a very obvious passion mark on his collarbone. His hair is also wilder than it was from earlier in the night.

 

McGucket looks interestedly at the both of you, his eyes catching every disheveled piece about you and Ford that you’d hoped no one would notice.

 

"Holy shit, I told you I’ve seen you before." You finally say to Ford when you find your voice, fighting off the inevitable flush spreading across your face.

 

"Stanley,” Ford says as though he hadn’t heard what you said. “How did you get here?" He gives McGucket a pointed look as though asking why he let Stanley in at all.

 

McGucket’s own flush spreads across his cheeks and he gives a downcast, embarrassed smile before moving over to you. He rests his forearm on your shoulder and leans into you, crossing one ankle over the other in a relaxed pose. You breathe in his scent of peppermint and something worn, like old books. You lean back into him and snake an arm around the small of his back while the both of you watch the twins.

 

Stanley digs into one of his jacket pockets and pulls out a postcard, hands it to his brother

 

Ford turns it over in his hands, reading the short, two-word message of ‘please come’. "I sent this so long ago.”

 

"Yeah, two years." Stanley’s voice is gruff and he rubs the back of his neck in a way that is so Ford that it almost hurts you to look at him at all.

 

“Why now?” Ford wants to know, holding the postcard up in a flourish before shoving it back into Stan’s chest.

 

“I got held up by a couple’a things, Ford. Its called life.”

 

“Yeah, well I needed you when I sent that. You could have at least called.”

 

“I did! And I know you knew it was me every time.”

 

“What, the random phone calls with the heavy breathing on the other end before I was abruptly hung up on? How the hell was I supposed to know that was you, you knucklehead?” Ford is pinching the bridge of his nose, eyes shut tight in annoyance.

 

“Hey!” You cut in, a crease on your brow, pulling away from McGucket. “There’s no need for juvenile name-calling, Stanford.”

 

“Yeah, aren’t you _above_ that, fancy college man?” Stan holds his hands out, raised, palms down, shoulders shrugged and rolls his eyes.

 

“You know nothing about our past, Y/N. Everything he put me through.”

 

“Everything _I_ put you through?” Stan asks indignantly, dropping his hands. “What about _me,_ huh? You let Pops kick me out when we were still just kids!”

 

You and McGucket look at one another, then at the twins.

 

“Is that true, Stanford?” McGucket asks, biting at his bottom lip, crossing his arms in front of his chest.

 

Ford doesn’t say anything. The rest of you just stand around and watch him, the wind and the house creaking and settling being the only sounds

 

“Partially,” Ford finally says. “Stanley…where have you been all these years?”

 

“Uh, across the country, then prison, then back here again.”

 

Ford gives him a searching look before he breaks out into such a hearty laughter that he actually wipes a tear from his eye. You watch something pass across Stan’s face, and he gives some not-so-heartfelt laughter, covering up the seriousness that Ford mistook as a deadpan, snarky humor.

 

“My brother is a real cut-up,” Ford tells you.

 

Stan looks nervously at you and McGucket. “Yeah, I’m a riot.”

 

Your squint your eyes at him. The good thing about being known as quiet all your life has given you great observation skills and a keen sense of reading people. You know there’s plenty of truth in what Stanley just disclosed.

 

Ford can’t stand it anymore and asks McGucket to join him in the lab downstairs. You think it’s so rude how he could leave you with someone you’ve only just met, but figured it is for the best that they not be around one another for a little while. You also wonder why Ford didn’t just kick him out.

 

Stan is looking at you, waiting for you to say something. The only thing you can come up with is, “You didn’t _break_ out of prison, did you? Like, there aren’t prison guards or federal agents or some scary goons on your trail that’ll bust in here any minute, are there?”

 

“Not that I know of,” he whispers conspiratorially at you before tipping you a wink.

 

You’ve never rolled your eyes so hard in your entire life.

 

 

\--

 

You lay in your small bed in the attic, but can’t sleep. The wind is keeping you up. You sit up in bed, your bare feet on the cold floor. You get out of bed and climb down the stairs as quietly as you can. You pad to the room across from the bedroom. It’s McGucket’s. You push the door open and know that if he wasn’t asleep before, then he wouldn’t be now from the loud creaking of the door groaning it open.

 

“Hadron?” You call softly from the threshold.

 

There is a shuffling sound as he pushes himself up into a sitting position. He reaches over to the bedside table and puts his glasses on. “Y/N? What is it?” He doesn’t sound too tired, so he was probably already awake, like you.

 

“Sorry, I can’t sleep.”

 

“Come in, please.” He pulls his comforter back as you shut his bedroom door. You get into bed with him and he lays back down next to you.

“I appreciate you all setting me up in the attic, but the insulation up there is next to nothing.”

 

“You can come down here anytime you like.” You’re surprised he doesn’t say something about fixing it. That’s his usual answer to everything you bring up.

 

You and McGucket’s tendencies to be affectionate towards one another is unrelenting in the night time and you figured it was only a matter of time before this happened.

 

He lay on his side to look at you, much like he did the day you both fell down in the snow. You take his glasses off his face and put them back on the small table. You run a hand through his bedhead.

 

“I kissed Ford,” you tell him.

 

“I could tell.”

 

“I’m sorry.” You felt the compulsion to apologize, even though you felt like you hadn’t truly done anything wrong.

 

“Why?”

 

“Because I like you, too.”

 

“Hell, darl. I know that. I like you, too. He and I been a thing fer over a year now.” He cups the side of your face in his hand. “Tell you the truth, the three of us been a thing for a while now. Just, no one wants ta say anything.”

 

You pull yourself to him and kiss him softly in the dark. He kisses you back with the tenderness of someone who hasn’t done this in a long time. He kisses you with the care of someone who has loved you for a very long time. He pulls you to his chest.

 

“Ta be honest, I never really been interested in stuff like that. I like stuff like this. It took a long time for Stanford to understand that about me.”

 

You’d heard about this before, but didn’t know much about it. “We only have to do what you’re comfortable with,” you tell him, pressing your nose into his hair.

 

“Thanks, darlin’. I hope Stanford comes up one night. He’s spends too much time down there.”

 

 

\--

 

You wake up in the morning before everyone else and decide to go downstairs to start some coffee. McGucket is still in a deep sleep by the time you pull your day clothes on. He’s pulling the blankets over the top of his head when you shut the bedroom door.

 

Downstairs is dark, the curtains shutting the daylight out. You tiptoe through the sitting room, headed to the kitchen when you see Ford still asleep on the couch.

 

He’s laying on the couch with several throw blankets bundled around him, covering up most of his head. You press a palm into his hair and lean forward to plant a kiss on his forehead.

 

You lay behind him on the couch and spoon him from behind, trying to catch all of his warmth from outside of the blankets.

 

"Good morning to you too, sweetheart.” The deep gravelly voice was clearly not Ford’s. “A guy always get woken up like this in the mornings around here?" Stan groans, slowly sliding a blanket off his head. He reaches up and rubs at his forehead.

 

You stumble backwards off the couch and roll your ankle before steadying yourself. He gets up, turning to sit out he couch like regular, the blankets bundled up in his lap.

 

“Wrong guy, huh?” He asks, however, there is a pleased look on his face from you mistaking him anyway.

 

“I—”

 

“Look, you clearly got somethin’ goin’ on with both of ‘em.” He shrugs. “I won’t get in your way. I’m just here to see my brother before I move on.

 

\--

 

But Stan stays for a week after that.

 

And he’s still around when it’s almost March.

 

And after the first night he stayed, you never saw he or Ford sleeping on the couch.

 

\--

You’re stretched out on the couch and reading a novel one afternoon when there isn’t much to do.

 

“What is that? A goat or something? Must be losing your mind.” You hear Stanley muttering to himself from the other room.

 

“I talk to myself, too,” you say loudly, meaning to embarrass him just because it’s too easy with this one.

 

Stan makes an appearance from the kitchen. “Yeah, you look like it, too,” he quips from around the lip of the coffee mug that he’s holding in both hands for warmth and sipping from. You smile back as he asks, “Who makes this brew anyhow? Its terrible.”

 

You tell him that its McGucket, but you find it endearing. “Every member of a group has to be bad at something. It’s the rules. McGucket’s terrible at coffee; your brother can’t drive.”

 

“Yeah, well, what’re you bad at, sweetheart?”

 

You bite your lip before copping out, “That’s not for me to determine. Its something the group has to determine.”

 

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. The rules, right?” It’s all he says, waving you off. “Can’t be too terrible for old Sixer to keep you around this long.”

 

You want to ask Stanley if that’s something he ever stopped to check if Ford actually liked being called it, but didn’t think it was your place to ask. You did just now try to jump his bones, thinking he was someone else and played it off believably, yet terribly.

 

Stanley sits down next to you on the couch and sips from his coffee, muttering something about hearing a goat bleating outside or something and asked you if you’d ever heard it. You tell him no, you’ve never really heard any kind of animals this close to the house.

 

He lets you go back to your book until he has another question. “So, think we got it all evened out, smartness-wise?”

 

“What’s that supposed to mean?” You’re slightly taken aback, offended almost.

 

“I just meant. My brother and his friend, they’re the sciency types. You don’t seem to be. I sure as hell ain’t.”

 

You begin to tell him something about there being different kind of smarts when Ford comes into the room, probably on his way to get some coffee,

 

“Stanley, don’t get her started on her master’s degree, lest you want to hear twelve different literary analyses of _Frankenstein_.”

 

“Yeah, no thanks; I’ll just watch the movies.”

 

You give Ford a scandalized look and he holds a calming hand up and wears an expression that says something like ‘Oh, I know’.”

 

Stanley exasperates you, but he (like McGucket) has been easy to talk to since your first meeting. You like talking to him about music. You have almost the same taste in it. He’s also good at magic tricks and other gimmicky things and has been teaching you basic sleight of hand tricks when you have free time. He’s also been teaching you how to shuffle a deck of cards, Vegas-style, much to Ford’s chagrin and McGucket’s amusement.

 

\--

 

 

The first nice day outside in a long time.

 

You’ve decided to work outside and Stan has been doing manual labor all day out there, too, sweating profusely. 

 

All week it has been in the lower forties and upper fifties and the rain has melted most of the snow away. Despite the good weather, there would be another cold front coming within the week, and besides there was still a chill at night that permeated the cabin. Because of this, Stan as spent most of the day chopping up wood for the fireplace and he is now in the stages of splitting it.

 

And because it is still a bit chilly, Stanley wears a heavy red flannel shirt. Most of the mid afternoon’s labor has left him flushed, and his hair damp. He’s tied his long hair up in a knotted bun, but you can clearly see how sweaty he still is. It is becoming loose from the dampness. He unbuttons his shirt all the way to the middle of his chest and rolls the sleeves up to his elbow. The shirt is soaked in the back and clings to him in a way that shows off the curve of his shoulders and the dip in the small of his back. His tight blue jeans cling to him like a second skin after being caught out in the short rain shower from the morning.

 

You’ve been working and reading, this time on a latest anomaly that Ford isn’t ready for you to type up and send out yet. It’s something about magnets and adhesive from a cave or something that he and McGucket went into a few weeks ago. He’s claiming that it’s of alien origin. You’ve never really believed in anything like that, however, your belief in a lot of things has changed ever since you've read about all the weird things he’s found in this town. Particularly in the woods near the cabin. 

 

You continue to watch Stan at work, especially when he has his back to you.

 

You turn back to your work when he comes up the steps to the porch, arm full of neatly split firewood.  He dumps them on the ground next to the couch you’re on in a loud thud. He squats down to his haunches and begins to stack them.

 

"You really like readin all that much everyday?" He stands when he is finished and wipes the sweat from his forehead with the back of his forearm.

 

His voice is gruff as he sits on the armrest of the couch. He cocks his head to look at what you’re working on. You can feel the heart of his work radiating off of him, and he smells like sweat, damp Old Spice deodorant, and outside. You glance over at him while he’s still reading. You see a thick thatch of dark chest hair and your stomach flips. He's very muscular, yet soft near his abdomen. You can see the pudge when he sits down.

 

A bead of sweat rolls a trail from his neck and disappears into his chest hair. Lust blossoms in your chest and creates a heat wave all the way to your core. If anything (at least in this moment), he oozes sex and you want him. You tell yourself it has nothing to do with Ford being weird and distant lately. You tell yourself it has nothing to do with him resembling Ford. Although they are twins, they are still look very distinct to you, and they are very different in a lot of ways.

 

You think to throw your binder and pencil across the porch and grab his shirt to pull him on top of you and fuck him right here in the open on this manky old couch.

 

"You, uh, have any plans for later tonight?" He looks down at you with his deep chocolate eyes. There are tired lines etched around them. His five o’clock shadow looks delicious in the afternoon sun and you want to feel it scratching all over your face, your neck.

 

You have no idea how you manage to find words to speak in a normal tone at him, "I got nothing.”

 

"Yeah? Me, too. Maybe we can catch the late show on the TV or somethin’." He stands up and looks down at you. You are face-level with his crotch. His jeans cling around it in an impressive bulge and you swallow hard.

 

"Yeah, that sounds good.” You grip your pencil tightly with both hands so you don’t have to worry about doing anything too rash or too forward.

 

"Great!" He grins at you before he goes back to the chopping block. You stare at your papers while you know that he’s still looking at you.

 

After a few minutes, you go back to watching him again and he actually strips his entire shirt off. His shoulders are broad and his biceps are thick with muscles and ropes of veins when he dons the splitting maul once more. He holds it horizontal at his waist, his left hand near the top and his right hand ear the base. His left hand slides down to meet his right one as he brings the maul over his head. In this movement, his abdomen tightens and pulls back, his ribs almost sticking out. He strikes the log, splitting it clear in half. His biceps and shoulder muscles tightening and flexing.

 

This is becoming too much. It is unbearable and you feel a tightness in your own pants.

 

You mark your reading place and close the binder and go to stand, to head inside, to head to your bedroom.

 

“Aren’t you afraid of a splinter flying into your eye?” You ask, half of you outside and looking at him.

 

 He holds the maul across his front again like earlier. He’s shifted his weight to one foot and stands in such a way that he could be posing for a sexy magazine. “I ain't afraid of nothin’, sweetheart.''

 

\--

 

One night you’re going to bed after just getting out of the shower and you see Preston outside. He’s just standing there, looking up at the attic’s triangular window. You run downstairs yelling for Ford and Stan. By the time they bust through the front door, Stan wielding a baseball bat, he is already gone.

 

\--

 

The thing about having mail in Gravity Falls was if you didn’t have a mailbox, then you had a PO Box in town at the post office. And the thing about having a PO Box (the purpose, really) was to not receive mail at home. As long as you’d been here, you’d never seen the guys receive mail here—McGucket always checks the box whenever you go into town.

 

But for whatever reason this morning, you find an unmarked envelope on the porch, under a rock and new freshly made footprints in the snow that were not there since Stanley arrived on Friday night.

 

You know its a stupid idea to open something of which you don’t know where it came from, but there is nothing else to do at the moment and you honestly expect it to be some kind of hand-made subscription form for the Gravity Falls Gossiper that Toby Determined has made and is taking door to door.

 

You did not expect a hand-printed invitation from the Northwest Estate (and on stationary, nonetheless) in emerald calligraphy ink inviting you and the guys to the End of Winter Masquerade Ball.

 

“Preston Northwest thinks he can spy on us.” Ford says, inspecting the invitation before passing it around. “Well, we’ll just have to spy on him, then.”

 

It is determined that you and Stan will go to the gala with Stan posing as Ford. Ford is sure that he won’t be able to handle this kind of thing.

 

\--

 

Stan drives the two of you to the manor the next night.

 

‘Even his car is sexy,’ you think to yourself and then roll your eyes internally. ‘Of course it is.’

 

You don’t talk much on the drive over and instead listen to a Bruce Springsteen on the radio. Stan knows every word and mutters them, tapping his fingers in time with it on the steering wheel. He looks over at you and smiles before patting your bare knee, reassuring you that it’ll all be fine.

 

You begin relaying the plan to him while he parks the car and you walk up to the entrance. Get inside, get information, get out. If Stan comes across Preston, hide his hands in his pockets. But really, you’re the one to stall Preston while Stan snoops around the best that he can to find any information about Preston that he wouldn’t willingly give up.

 

“..and we’ll rendezvous by a checkpoint after the first hour or so.” You finish telling Stan the not so great plans or instructions that Ford had given you in a bored manner.

 

"Sounds sexy,” Stan wiggles his eyebrows at you, wanting to get a laugh. “ _Rendezvous._ ”

 

"It just means to meet again and it’ll probably be in a shitty closet.”

 

Next to nobody is in the manor by the time the two of you arrive. There’s a basket on an end table in the foyer with a hand printed sign that says: Please Take One, referring to the identical pairs of masks.

 

A peacock wobbles over to the two of you and shits in front of Stan.

 

"Well, I’m ready to go," he says, turning back around and going to open the front doors again. 

 

"Stanley, we need to do this."

 

"No, sweetheart, this is clearly some kinda trap." He turns the mask over in his hands. It is easily the cheapest thing in the house besides the clothes the two of you are wearing, which aren’t bad.

 

You’ve had a ‘little black dress’ in your possession for a while for events like this (usually not as nice). Stan is in a tuxedo with a red bowtie. He is wearing an extra pair of Ford’s glasses that he keeps in the house. McGucket even gave him a haircut to more closely resemble Ford. You were sad to see his hair go, remembering how wonderful it looked in the sweaty bun the other day when he was working outside.

 

“Who does this?” He doesn’t bother to disguise or downplay the disgust in his voice.

 

"Its a huge, prestigious thing they throw every year, Stanley. It’s a legitimate thing." God, how much you sound like your mother in this moment. How often had she hoped for an invitation to any kind of Northwest gala?

 

"Its a _deserted_ thing. They invited us just to laugh at us, I bet.”

 

"If you wanna go, that’s fine. But I’m staying. We really need to see what the hell he wants with the cabin."

 

"Y/N, he just wants a new toy. That’s it. I know guys like this. I used to clean their pools, work on their cars. All they want is more shit to make themselves feel better than people like us, and the more they can take from us, the better they feel."

 

"Oh my God, you sound so much like Stanford right now,” you sigh this out, meaning to keep it to yourself, really.

 

"Hey, I’ll have _you_ know that my brainiac brother and I are _nothing_ alike, all right?" He is wagging his finger in your face by now, his chest almost touching yours. He has walked you backwards into a nearby naked statue.

 

Your cheeks flush more so out of embarrassment than anything else with being yelled at. "Got it." 

 

"Good.” His expression softens a bit and you can tell he’s a little upset for lashing out.

 

Same temper as Ford and everything, geeze. You won’t tell him this, though.

 

He takes a step away from you. "Five minutes and I’m gone, with or without you, capiche?"

 

But the latter part doesn’t sound true at all—Ford wouldn’t have it and wouldn’t let him hear the end of it.

 

You’ve been in the foyer long enough that if you were going to see anybody, they would have come by now. You decide to scan the surroundings to find a checkpoint. The entrance and foyer are pretty open, but off to the side is a door. You yank his sleeve and nod in its direction.

 

Stan yanks it right open without any preamble. "Closet. A point for you, doll.” There are rolled up architecture prints and old shoes at the bottom of it, but that is all.

 

"Good; we’ll meet in there. It looks like they don’t even use it for anything—I’m sure no one will go in there."

 

"Well need a signal,” he tells you, shutting the door and looking past you to see if you’re still alone. “Like a knock to know if it’s the other one coming in." He taps lightly on the door several times with some pauses in between, like a steady heartbeat. He looks into your eyes, eyebrows raised and waiting for your approval. You just nod and he nods back. You hold each other’s gaze for a long time, until you notice that you’re still holding onto his tux’s sleeve and you abruptly let go.

 

"Lets get this shit show over with" he dons the mask he picked up from the basket at the entrance. 

 

“You have a watch, right?” You ask, concerned for the time limit.

 

“Uh, no.  But I’m thinkin' I can lift one offa someone here.” Again, he wiggles his eyebrows suggestively and you roll your eyes before taking your own off and pressing it into his hand. 

 

“Keep an eye on it. I mean it.”

 

“Come on, how’re you supposed to know what time it is, then?”

 

You tell him not to worry about it. McGucket had given you a pocket watch that he actually made himself for you after you told him how much you loved timepieces. It is in the small clutch you are carrying to match your dress.

 

Stan puts the watch on his wrist. It’s always been big on your wrist, so it isn’t completely tiny on his. It actually looks good on him. He admires it for a minute before going away. 

 

“One hour.” He says this at you, biting his lip, finally looking nervous, his eyes shifting around the room.

 

“You okay, Stanley?”

 

His eyes meet yours once more. He covers your bare shoulders with his large, warm hands. Your skin breaks out into goose bumps and you hope he doesn’t notice. “Told you, I ain’t afraid of anything, sweetheart.”

 

-

 

Everyone is dressed identically and Stan is the only person wearing a bowtie instead of an actual tie. You’re worried this will make him stand out, but he does a good job with disappearing into the crowd and then taking a detour away from the party, seamlessly, hands stuffed in his pockets.

 

There are very few women here and you notice that they are the only ones not wearing masks. Probably so the men can tell which ones they want by the end of the night and you frown, stomach twisting at their entitlement. 

 

Preston seemingly materializes in front of you. You know it is Preston because of his initials embroidered on his jacket. 

 

"Y/N?"

 

"Perhaps." You say this with mirth in your voice, wanting to get him riled up, but it doesn’t work.

 

"It is you. I know your voice. Did you bring Stanford along?" He stands on his tiptoes and looks over and behind you, as though you are hiding him.

 

"He’s here somewhere,” you say levelly. “Left me in the dust, so it seems."

 

Preston’s mouth draws into a thin line of disgruntlement. "So it seems" he echoes.

 

“I think he said he was off to look for you, actually.”

 

Preston looks wildly around the room. "I see.” There’s something off about him. His hair isn’t as perfect as it was the day that you met him and that seems odd for someone like him. “How do you like the party?”

 

“You have a gorgeous home,” you say, avoiding his question. “Look, I’m sure if you stick with me, then Stan…ford will bump back into you at some point.”

 

“I suppose you’re right.”

 

“May I ask why you invited us?” You press, taking two glasses of campaign from a silver platter when a waiter walks by. You hand Preston one and he throws it back in one gulp. He take the other glass in your hand that you meant for yourself.

 

“I daresay, an old…friend…of mine is quite curious to meet your… _partner_.”

 

“Oh, yeah?”

 

“Indeed.” Preston throws back the other glass and whistles for another waiter, making a request for an Old Fashioned. “Would you care for something stronger, Y/N?” You order a gin and tonic.

 

“Who is your friend?” It is clear Preston has been drinking all night and that you would probably be able to get some good information out of him, especially if you feigned being his drinking buddy for the night. He is steering you over to a corner of the main room where a plant is. If anything, you could pretend to have several drinks with him while dumping your own into the plant when he isn’t looking.

 

“Bill Cipher. Very philosophical fellow. Actually told me that he’s met Stanford in dreams as of late and that is why he’s come to town again. Don’t know what all that’s about. Said he knew him at college or something like that and wants to reconnect with him. An old school chum.”

 

You furrow your brow. The only person that Stanford was ever really close to in college was McGucket. And they’d never mentioned anyone by that name. Preston leans into a nearby wall, his gaze heavy and unfocused. He starts talking about the family coat of arms that is hanging up on the wall above your head, above the nearby fireplace, for the next half an hour. More drinks come and he binges through them before transitioning in a jarring manner back to that Bill character.

 

“Mr. Cipher has been staying with me. He’s an old family friend, you see.” He gulped his third Old Fashioned in under a minute and called for another, slurring his request. “I’m sure I’ve a painting of him somewhere in the house. Would you like to see it?” Preston’s head bobs and he leans in close to you, lowering his voice. “He isn’t a very nice man, nor a good house guest.”

 

‘Old family friend,’ you think to yourself. Then, he must have been older than Ford when he was at school. Perhaps this Cipher guy was an old professor and Preston was just not using the words that he meant to.

 

“I’m sorry Preston, perhaps later. I need to use the restroom. Excuse me.”

 

When you turn away, you open your clutch to check the time to find that your hour is just about up, and you rush back to the closet, throwing a careful eye behind your shoulder while you make your way back to assure yourself you aren’t being followed or watched.

 

 

\--

 

You’ve been in the closet for almost ten minutes.

 

He’s late. He probably got held up doing something stupid: some kind of bet or something. Wasn’t watching his watch. Maybe even got caught by Preston. 

 

But the knocks are on the door and then he’s in there with you, and is locking the door behind him. 

 

"Find anything?" You ask in a breathless whisper.

 

"Not a damn thing. Just a weird-as-shit painting with a buncha triangles. You?" You’re very surprised that he’s able to keep his voice down. The thing that he wasn’t good at was being quiet, all but screaming everything at all times--no inside voice here. 

 

"I got stuck with Preston. He told me some interesting, albeit, strange things. I’ll save it for when we get home."

 

“Yeah,” is all he says, looking into you deeply again.

 

Your breath catches in your throat when he raises his hand to your face and wipes at the corner of your mouth.

 

“Your lipstick is smeared,” he purrs quietly.

“I had a drink,” you whisper stupidly.

 

Then he’s pulling you into a fierce kiss, teeth lashing out on your mouth, biting your lip enough to draw blood. You cry out in pain and ecstasy and he licks at your wound then kisses it with such gentleness that for a moment you think you’re kissing Ford again. 

 

But it’s not Ford, its Stanley, and he’s far rougher around the edges and his hands are rougher too. He’s thicker, stronger. Your hands reach up and tug frantically at his bowtie, it hangs around his collar and you go to unbutton his shirt with shaking fingers, fumbling to expose his chest. A gold chain lays against the dark hairs. You splay your fingers across his exposed skin and look up at him, tugging at the hairs.

 

He grabs your face in both of his hands and pulls you into him, then pushes you against the wall before claiming your lips again. You smell whiskey on his breath and something smoky like a cigar. Your hands fly to his hair and you explore each one, tugging hard and kiss him back without abandon. He moans a soft _fuck_ into your mouth and that sets you off and you mutter a delirious _I need you now_ into his own.

 

He hands are hooking at the back of your thighs and before you know it, he’s lifted you off your feet and has pressed your back harder into the wall. His mouth is on your neck then collarbone in an instant. You grip at his hair, tugging painfully at it with both hands before you bite down on your knuckles to stifle your whines and so you don’t beg with desperation for more. He slides the straps of your dress off your shoulders and bites down hard, but with enough resistance that its tender.

 

He sets you back on your feet for a brief second to pull your panties down so roughly that they won’t fit you right later. They hang at one ankle and he’s wrapping your legs around his waist again. His cock is out of his pants in a few swift moments. The leaking slit of its head is pressed into the opening of your heat. He just rests it there and rocks gently against you.

 

You wrap your arms around his neck as he traces your lips with an index finger. You kiss the tip of it before letting your tongue dart out and wet it. He groans deeply before gently caressing your cheek with his thumb. He’s at your neck again, leaving slow, agonizing kisses, licking at the sweat-slicked skin and whispering filthy things in your ear.

 

“I watch you all the time. Drive me crazy. Saw you come out the shower yesterday, no towel. Didn’t leave my room all day. Thought I'd jack my dick off or that I’d come dust before it was over with.” He’s whispering this hoarsely, furiously in your ear. His hand cups the back of your neck and your foreheads are pressed together. He won’t shut up. “I saw the way you was lookin’ at me the other day, too, when we were outside. You wanted me to fuck you then, didn’t you? Bet you ran to your room and didn’t think you could ever fuck yourself so hard, so good.”

 

It was true.

 

But you don’t tell him this and instead, guide his mouth to yours again and try to tell him this with your tongue in his mouth.

 

“Stanley, please,” you moan against his bottom lip. “Please.”

 

He finally pushes into you and you cry out much louder than you expect. He covers your mouth with his in slow kisses to match the pace he’s moving his hips into you with. He reaches down with a free hand and massages slick circles over your clitoris. His face is in the hollow of your neck, panting out your name. “Come for me, Y/N, please.” He leaves sloppy kisses on your exposed shoulder as he pumps faster into you, losing control.

 

You feel yourself let go around him and cry out his name, feeling your heat swallow him whole. He pulls out of you in time and spills himself down the length of your thigh. He pulls the handkerchief from his jacket’s breast pocket and kneels down to clean you gently, leaving a sweet kiss on the spot.

 

He holds you against him when you’re on your feet again, as feeling comes back to your legs and you steady yourself. He doesn’t let go even when you tell him you’re able to walk again, just keeps you cradled against his exposed chest, stroking your hair. You hear his racing heartbeat slow down the longer you stay like this.

 

He tucks himself back into his pants and shoves the handkerchief in his pants pocket. He cracks the closet door open and peeks around to see if anyone is around. They aren’t. He leads you out of the manor, holding your hand tightly in his, fingers linked between one another. He doesn’t let your hand go the whole ride back to the cabin.

 

You think about Ford, wondering if this is a betrayal.

 

\--

 

He takes you upstairs to the room you assume he’s been sleeping in since he’s moved from the couch. He spoons you tightly from behind and is asleep within minutes. You know morning will come soon, and try to will yourself to sleep.

 

Your sleep is short and you wake up when the sun comes through the blinds of the window. Before you can open your eyes, you feel weight in the open space of the bed next to you. It is Ford and he lays on his side, facing you, and drapes his arm across your abdomen, drawing himself close to you and your sleepwarmth. Stanley turns on his side to face you, too, and drapes his arm across you, resting it on top of Ford’s arm.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've been feeling Stan a lot lately. I hope this was okay. I haven't written smut in a long time!


	5. Love Like Ghosts (Part I)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Ford is starting to go through being possessed by Bill, unbeknownst to the reader, Stan, and Fiddleford thus far.
> 
> -  
> "Oh and the moonlight baby shows you what’s real  
> There ain't a language for the things I feel  
> And if I can't have you then no one ever will  
> Oh, if I can't have you then no one ever will
> 
> I don't feel it till it hurts sometimes  
> Oh go on baby, hurt me tonight  
> I want ours to be an endless song  
> Baby in my eyes you do no wrong  
> I don't feel it till it hurts sometimes  
> So go on baby hurt me tonight  
> All the spirits that I know I saw  
> Do you see no ghost in me at all  
> Oh I sing all day and I love you through the night"  
> -Lord Huron, ‘Love Like Ghosts’

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I apologize for this being short or awful. I've had a really terrible week b/c of work and mental health-wise. I didn't have my usual free time in the evenings to work on this, which upsets me because I love this story. I wanted to give ya'll something so I don't miss my regular Sunday update. Next week's post should be much longer (I'm thinking more than the usual 7,000+ word count to make up for this short one) with lots more smut and fluff and hurt/comfort.
> 
> Thank you, everyone, who is keeping up with this story and commenting. It really does make my day so much and makes me even happier to work on this story.
> 
> Title from Lord Huron's 'Love Like Ghosts'

\--

 

 

You sleep past noon that day and it’s been so long since you’ve done that. There’s a throbbing ache in your thighs from you and Stan’s bout in the Northwest foyer closet and it just felt better in your bones and muscles to sleep in longer. The Pines twins keep you unbelievably warm long after the sun has come in through the curtains. You’ve turned again and are curled up on Stan’s chest.

 

He’d taken his shirt off in his sleep and he smells like he did when he was too close to you after splitting wood the other day. Your nose is in his dark chest hair and your hand is resting next to it; his nose is pressed into your hair and his left hand is covering your hand, small in his. His right arm is stretched out behind your head and is holding the side of Ford’s. Ford is spooning you tightly, tucked into your like the most perfect puzzle piece, his forehead pressed to the back of your neck. You know they are both waking up, but holding onto staying in bed just a bit longer.

 

You decide to play along until the arm Ford has around you stirs and his hand starts roaming the space on your hip, over your stomach, squeezing and caressing. He kisses you, lingering at the nape of your neck. His hand roams upward and cups your breast softly in his large palm, squeezing softly and pulling you closer into his chest while he grinds against you from behind. You moan softly and stretch before hugging Stanley and turning to face Stanford. His hand trails over your hip, to the small of your back and pulls you into a soft good-morning, full mouth kiss. You run a hand through his hair that is fluffier than usual.

 

Stan groans awake and snuggles into you from behind before pushing himself up to give you a kiss below your jawline. He reaches over you and grabs Ford from the back of his head and pulls him into a slow kiss, pulling back slightly to trace his bottom lip with the tip of his tongue. Ford whines and pushes himself up to meet his brother’s face fully. You turn to lay on your back to watch them, like a tent over you. They clutch at each other’s faces in a mirror image, careful lips and gentle nudges of noses. When they pull apart, they look at each other and then to you, their noses and cheeks flushed pink. Your are very excited—your heart is hammering in your chest like you’d ran a mile.

 

Stan runs his hand up your shirt, palm on your belly and you feel yourself so close to squirming until he frowns. “Oh, my god. Is that _my_ shirt?”

 

“Yes. It was on the floor. I thought that meant it was fair game!” You argue, pulling it shut near your chest. It is the shirt he was working in the other day and looked like the most comfortable thing to sleep in besides the sex-stained black dress from the night before.

 

“Please, Stanley. She is adorable in it,” For says, playing with the too-long sleeve, bringing your hand in his lap to hold.

 

“It’s my sexy shirt, Ford!” Stanley presses a palm to his chest, wounded.

 

“I _knew_ you knew what you were doing the other day in this damn thing!” You cry this out indignantly and push yourself up to glare at him. He holds his hand out expectantly, as though asking for the shirt back, but a grin playing on his mischievous features. “You are such a brat.” You swat at his hand with your free one.

 

“And you are wearing a dirty floor shit. Yeah, I haven’t washed it yet!”

 

It really doesn’t bother you because it is very comfortable.

 

\--

 

By the midafternoon, Stan had relayed the story about his stolen shirt to McGucket at the kitchen table while McGucket is trying to work the crossword puzzle in the Gravity Falls Gossiper.

 

“Sounds real rough, Stanley. I don’t know how you’ll ever recover from that.” McGucket chews at the eraser on the pencil in his hand, grinning at Stan from around the pink.

 

“Thank you!” Stan says loudly, slapping the table with his hand. He twists around in his chair to give you an obnoxious look and you shake your head at him while rooting through the refrigerator.

 

“I don’t know where he comes up with these stories, Hadron; I’ve had this shirt all my life.”

 

“Oh, yeah, darl. That’s the shirt I met ya in. Sure did.” He says absentmindedly as he scribbles in a word in the small blocks. He has beautiful handwriting, even if it’s just in blocky letters on the crappy newsprint.

 

“What?!” Stan cries, wounded yet again. He reclines in the chair on its hind legs. “I see what’s goin’ on here. All you gangin’ up on poor ole Stan Pines.”

 

You sit at the table with them and watch McGucket work. You want to do the word scramble game next, but before you can ask, McGucket is thumbing through the paper now, scanning different stories. You grab his forgotten pencil and the nearby sharpener and go to work sharpening it. Stan watches your hands work, gripping at the pencil and twisting it.

 

His chair falls back onto all fours and you catch his hungry glance from across the table. His bottom lip is caught between his teeth and his dark eyes smolder. You blush furiously and stare intently at the pencil.

 

A sick, warm wave of guilt floods your stomach—you hadn’t told McGucket or Ford about last night with Stanley yet. Worse than that, you and _Stan_ hadn’t talked about it yet, either. And that affection fest earlier in the afternoon…what did _that_ mean?

 

“What the fuck?” McGucket mutter, leaning in closer to read the paper in front of him, then adds as an aside, “Pardon my language, honeys.”

 

“What is it, Fidds?” Stan’s attention is taken from you and he scoots closer to McGucket, squinting down at the paper, as well.

 

McGucket spins the paper around at an angle that you and Stanley can read the headline he’d reacted to: ‘Hor d'oeuvres and _Hanky-Panky_ at Northwest Gala?’

 

You and Stan look at each other immediately and Stan slides the newspaper closer to the both of you to look down at the small black and white photos. There were several and they were all of you and Stan. There you were walking up to the manor; there you were meeting up at the closet; there you were going into the closet alone; Stan coming to the closet; the two of you leaving together looking way more disheveled than you thought you looked leaving. However, each of the pictures are of such poor quality, that there was no way to discern who the people in the photos were at all.

 

The article is poorly written and is nothing but speculation about what may or may not have happened in the closet concerning the ‘Mystery Duo’.

 

“What’d ya’ll do in that closet?” McGucket looks up and at you two from the top of his glasses, a ghost of a smile on his lips.

 

Stan answers him without missing a beat, “Exactly what they think we did.”

 

McGucket’s face breaks out into a full-on grin. “Good fer ya’ll. Serves his bougie ass. I hope ya’ll left a helluva mess.”

 

Stan’s laughter is a strong roar and he looks at you with a twinkle of pride in his eyes.

 

\--

 

Another nice day and McGucket wants to know if you’d like to walk to the library with him and return the MLA handbook. He’s going out of town later in the evening (an overnight trip for some reason) and will pick up your own copy on his way back in the morning.

 

“I can drive us there instead, if you’d like.”

 

But you enjoy your walks to town with him so much that you’d rather walk and enjoy weather that isn’t frigid and damp than have just a very short car ride together.

 

“Let’s walk, since I won’t get to see you any tomorrow,” you say, picking the book up from the kitchen table.

 

He holds the door open for you and follows you out with his banjo. He shrugs into the strap and tunes it a bit while walking and starts plucking out some notes. Its been a week or so since he played, which made you sad because usually its a nightly thing that you ask him to do (mostly in hopes of him teaching you).

 

He begins humming with the random notes he’s playing when you all enter the woods and follow the path you usually take. He switches tunes and starts playing John Denver’s ‘Country Roads’. He does a really good Denver—he has a really sweet voice and oftentimes you prefer listening to him over the radio that Ford keeps in the house.

 

You’re lost listening to him and looking at nature coming to life in anticipation of spring. Even the air is different and it makes you smile as you look over at McGucket. The wind is blowing his dirty blonde locks and the afternoon sun is glinting off his glasses, illuminating his face and own slight stubble.

 

He swings his banjo to his back when the song comes to an end so he can grab your hand and walk with you in silence. You enjoy the sounds of the birds calling to one another and squirrels chittering away. There is a snap of sticks nearby and you assume it’s a baby deer or something else adorable—apparently the scarier things in the woods are deeper in and in the other direction. When the snap happens again, McGucket stops walking and tugs at your wrist to make you stop with him. You do and you both hold your breath to listen. There’s another snap, closer this time, and you both wheel around.

 

It’s Preston. And he’s walking in the direction of the cabin. It’s like he’s walking with visors that blind his peripheral vision, as he doesn’t notice either of you. He’s walking in a stiff, but also loose manner, like he is drunk and trying to walk like a sober person.

 

McGucket nods his head in that direction and you both trail behind him.

 

“How much further is this place, Moneybags?” Preston asks himself in a strange, strained and high-pitched voice.

 

“Not much further,” Preston’s regular voice comes out, but sounds exhausted and pleading for a break. “Why can’t you remember?”

 

“I ain’t so good with directions, Pretty Boy,” the strange voice is back. “Besides, you only took me here one another time.”

 

You and McGucket hide behind a tall and thick tree.

 

“Okay, what in the blue hell is that?” He whispers, pointing his thumb in the direction of Preston.

 

You shrug. “Your guess is as good as mine. But I do remember when he showed up a few weeks ago. It was around the time that Stan came home.” You peer over McGucket’s shoulder to watch Preston continue in the opposite direction that the two of you needed to go in. “He’s drunk, Hadron. That’s all. I think he has a problem. He was in a bad way at the party the other night.”

 

“Think we ought to go back and warn the boys? What if he tries to break in?”

 

“With Stan in the house? He will kick his ass in about two seconds if he tried any of that.”

 

McGucket chews his lip and looks over at Preston who is getting further and further away. “What does he want? What did you figure out the other night?”

 

“I told you and Ford,” you said, slightly annoyed after having to repeat the story again about Preston’s drunken rant about his friend Bill (who no one has ever seen since then or anytime before) who wants to meet Ford. “What is it that you and Ford are keeping from everyone, Fiddleford? People usually don’t protect their research this much. And everything you’ve had me look at doesn’t make sense. You give me fragmented materials. I can’t put anything together, or how it’s all related.”

 

McGucket sighs and drags you away to another tree, putting more distance between the two of you and the retreating Preston. “Look, don’t tell Ford I told you…but, I’m goin’ outta town to get some…chemical materials. I’m gonna steal them, darl. Ford an’ I need them to turn our project on.”

 

“Turn your project on?” You echo, raising an eyebrow. “I don’t understand.”

 

“We’ll show you soon. We were fittin’ ta take you and Stanley down into the lab in the next couple’a nights ta show you what we been workin’ on.”

 

You don’t like the idea of McGucket out of anyone to go out and steal something that sounds highly dangerous and highly illegal.

 

You’re worried that they’re about to turn into exactly what you didn’t think they were, proving your mother and everyone in town correct that they were up to no good.

 

\--

 

Turns out McGucket packed a bag earlier in the morning and threw it in the Jeep some time before the two of you left in that afternoon.

 

Ford is waiting for you when you walk in alone. He’s on the couch outside. You make it up the stairs and stop in front of him. He doesn’t say anything to you until McGucket drives away. Ford stands, an annoyed look on his face.

 

“What were you and Stanley thinking?”

 

“What are you talking about?”

 

He gives you that newspaper that Ford had in the morning. “I can’t believe you would do something so foolish in someone else’s house!”

 

It has been a while since Ford has shouted at you (no longer upset by the critiques you make on his work like early on in your relationship), and you actually recoil from him.

 

“Ford, you can’t even tell this is us in the pictures.”

 

“It doesn’t matter. Preston came knocking on my door while you and McGucket were away, shouting at me about the indecent act. Stanley did a good enough job disguising himself as me that Preston thought it was you and I. I was at a loss for what to say to him!”

 

“So, you should have just told him to fuck off like you did to my mother that day.”

 

“He’s threatening to give information to the press about this scandal and also falsify a ton of information about my house, about my research, and—”

 

“He isn’t a cop! He can’t just come kick your door in.”

 

“He can _buy_ the cops, Y/N.” He is fuming and inches away from your face. For the first time in a very long time, you see that his eyes are way more golden than his usual honey brown color.

 

“You’re having nightmares again.” You actually take a step away from him because he’s frightening you a little bit.

 

“Preston is the nightmare. I have much work to do. I don’t have time for this. None of you understand me.” He pushes past you and lets the door slam, leaving you standing on the porch with the shitty newspaper in your hand and thinking about how this is _not_ the man you were in bed with just a few mornings ago.

 

\--

 

You don’t see Stan that evening until you’re heading into the kitchen to grab a glass of water. He’s on all fours in the living room and appears to be struggling very much. He’s scuffing around on his knees, cursing when he burns his forearms on the ratty carpet.

 

“Can I help you in any way at all?” You ask him, choking back a laugh. This is the first time you’ve smiled since your encounter with Ford. Your experiences with the scientists today have left a bad taste in your mouth.

 

“Can’t find the damn remote Poindexter made for the TV. You seen it anywhere?” He playfully tugs at your pants’ ankle cuff, shaking it as though you were hiding it and it would come tumbling out.

 

“No!” You laugh and kick at him with a socked foot. “It probably didn’t go very far.” He goes to grab your foot, but you leap out of the way. “Not on a school night anyway. It knows it has a six o’clock curfew,” you add this dumb remark to see if he would even notice it.

 

Lately, he’s been distracted and hasn’t noticed a lot of stuff you’ve said or done. Preston’s visit, or Ford’s change, has left an uneasy and palpable tension in the room.

 

He stops what he’s doing and sits on his knees, facing you, to give you an incredulous look before a sharp bark of laughter. He grips at his muscular jean –clad thighs and you feel yourself blush. He goes to stand, pushing himself up, and you see for a split second all of the muscles in his arms working to support him and bring him to his feet.

 

“Somethin’ bothering ya, doll?” He pushes his brown hair from his face. It falls back into place in layers. He sweeps it across his forehead, and out of his eyes. “You been awfully quiet since last night. Ain’t like you.” He tries to keep his voice level as he searches your face, but the sound of burning curiosity bursts forth. His dark eyes betray any casual interest he is feigning. This is longing.

 

“Its nothing.” Your turn away from him and try to go to the kitchen like you planned. Looking at him too long makes your legs hurt and your chest tight. “I mean. It’s just. I’ve been thinking about Stanford a lot lately.” Your hand goes to the back of your neck and you rub it warm. You try not to look at Stan.

 

“Oh. Yeah…’course.” Stan frowns and turns his back to you, too. Of course you would be thinking about his smarty-pants brother. A lot. The two of you have lots in common. “Good ole’ Poindexter, huh?”

 

“Your brother ought to be more careful.” You finally turn around because you want to show him just how concerned you are, how earnest you must look.

 

Stan cocks his head to the side, but doesn’t turn around. “What do you mean?” His arms are crossed, but its like he’s hugging himself, bracing himself for some kind of bad news.

 

You don’t know what to do with your hands or the rest of your body in this awkward silence, so you mumble something about helping him look for the remote even though you’re sure you’ve never seen such a thing in all the time you’ve been here.

 

He goes back to looking too, digging into the armchair’s cushion and other hiding places.

 

You finally break the silence again when you feel his expectant eyes on you. “Literature tells us that nothing good can come from reaching this far into the unknown.” You pull yourself out from under the couch and see Stan lift the chair.

 

“Books, books, books,” Stan rolls his eyes before sitting the chair back down. “I’m sure Ford read that somewhere, too, ya know. You ain’t the only one who ever read a book.”

 

“Stanley,” you say seriously, pushing yourself into a standing position. You face up to him—there isn’t much of a height difference. He is a short man. “He’ll get burned. Or, he’ll hurt one of you.” You press your index finger into his chest.

 

“One of us,” he corrects you, grabbing at your finger and holding it in his large, warm hand before pointing at himself and then you. “Like it or not, you’re in this gang, too, for better or worse. . Even when Ford’s bein’ a dick." He squeezes your finger and gives a reassuring look before pulling away from you. “It don’t last forever; he’ll come around, I promise.

 

“Sure.”

 

You go to one of the bookshelves you and McGucket built in the sitting room, much to Stan’s chagrin even though it wasn’t in the way at all. You pull out a Lovecraft tome and press it into his hands. “Most of these stories are comics and films now, if you don’t feel like reading them all. He can be quite verbose sometimes. All the stuff that he’s has me read about since I got here, sounds like some nightmare I’ve read in books like this, and the characters never end up okay.”

 

Stan takes the heavy book out of your hand. You can see the muscles in his bicep and forearm tighten from under his rolled up shirtsleeves as he takes the bulk of the book’s weight into his hand. “All right, all right. I’ll look through it. Happy?” He quirks an eyebrow at you in a way to tell you that he’s not going to believe your answer, either way.

 

“Of course!” Your smile feels fake, so you run an impatient hand through your hair and ask him, “Now, please tell me there’s some damn beer left?”

 

“You ain’t just whistlin’ Dixie, sister. I’m sure there’s plenty.”

 

“Race you to the icebox. I’m down to chugging one in five seconds.” He taught you how to do it in about fifteen.

 

“Lies!” He tugs the back of your shirt to slow you down and beats you to the kitchen.

 

Ford is sleeping at the table, but it is a fitful sleep. And when he wakes, it’s like waking up from a late afternoon nap, sweat slicked from a fever dream, and confused about where you are.

 

Ford says nothing as he exits the room and you turn to Stan who is in the middle of raising his beer to his lips. You press your hand onto his forearm to lower the beer away and confess to him,

 

“I think something’s wrong with Ford. I think this research is making him sick. He’s been okay for a while, but now he’s slipping into the fatigue and meanness I remember back when I first met him.”

 

“I heard him talkin’ to himself in a funny voice after Preston left the other day.”

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, Bill has been possessing Preston, and has been trying to use Preston as a vessel to get to Ford and possess him. He has already inserted himself in Ford's dreams/nightmares, but I have it to where Preston has passed Bill to Ford when he visited him in this chapter. Ford's mood is due to the early stages of possession, but also being hurt that the reader was intimate with Stan before himself.


	6. Love Like Ghost (Part II)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> (Second half of previous chapter)
> 
> In which the Reader finds out something about McGucket from his diary and Stan makes a startling revelation about his brother. 
> 
> \---  
> Do you believe you're missin' out  
> That everything good is happening somewhere else?  
> But with nobody in your bed  
> The night's hard to get through…
> 
> I know you're coming in the night like a thief  
> But I've had some time alone to hone my lying technique  
> I know you think that I'm someone you can trust  
> But I'm scared I'll get scared and I swear I'll try to nail you back up
> 
> -‘Jesus Christ’, -Brand New  
> \--
> 
> Title from Lord Huron 'Love Like Ghosts'

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the long hiatus. I've had so much going on in what little free time I have outside of work. I really want to finish this story. I feel like coming back to it in shorter chapters will be easier. Thanks for sticking with it and reading it. I love to still receive kudos for it and am glad to know it is something people still enjoy.

\---

“When is McGucket coming home?” Stan chews at the tip of his thumb and gazes into your eyes.

“Sometime tomorrow it sounded like.” You reach out and wrap your fingers around his wrist and pull his hand away from his mouth and kiss his knuckles to get him to stop gnawing nervously. A small blush spreads across his cheeks as he looks away, embarrassed that you noticed what he was doing. “I think I’m going to go lay down, Stanley. I’ll take Fiddleford’s room since he’s not going to need it.”

You go toward the steps and rest your hand on the cold banister, memorizing the feel of the rough wood in your hand during your slow trek up, then he asks in a low voice (one that you’re not sure if he meant to kept to himself),

“Do you think one of us shoulda gone with him?” The floor groans under his weight as he moves away from where you have left him and you hear the clunky sound of the blinds being pulled apart as he looks outside from beside the front door, as though watching for the Jeep to return instantly. “Did we do the right thing by stayin’ here?”

“I think he’ll be fine.” You really want to believe your words and then feel like an ass that you would ever doubt the ability of McGucket at all. He can do anything, after all. “I think he’s been going on long rides by himself for a very long time.”

Stan harrumphs and mutters something along the lines of the open road being his only friend for nearly a decade or more.

You chuckle, “What, you think your reckless driving would have done him a ton of good if you had gone with him?”

“I’ll have you know, sweetheart, that I’m the best driver I know.”

“You need glasses, darling.” You think of his crazed swerving to and from the Northwest manor.

“Yeesh, you’d hafta kill me before I wear those goofy things.” He stays quiet for a beat, just watching the outside as you watch the dark hallway. You feel like you see movement out of the corner of your eye—something like a shadow moving into a nearby bedroom, but its just your eyes playing tricks. Right?

Stan’s voice breaks you out of your shuddering thought. “Besides, I know runnin’ that car motor gets your motor runnin’.” You can hear the cheeky grin in his voice and you can’t help but make a disgusted sound over the bad joke. 

“Please let me nap in silence.” You make this request from the top of the stairs, and feel his gaze on your back. He shifts his weight and the floor’s groan secures your thought that he is still there, and closer to the stairs now.

You watch the dark for minutes as you feel him watch your back. You shift your weight and feel a chill near the back of your neck and you hold yourself, ready for bed.

“I think it’s always hard to know, Stan,” is what you end up saying to him, tracing your finger in fidgety, small circles at the top of this bannister. 

“What?” His gruff voice barks out. You can just see his brow furrowed before you even turn around.

You do turn around, this time the fingers on your other hand harassing the bannister. You go on, staring at him intently. Looking over his face, his hair, his tired eyes. “To know if you—or any of us—are ever doing the right thing. I think by the time we figure it out, its too late. And all that matters is how hard you tried to take care while you were able to.”

He stares at you, in a profound way you think, as you watch him nibble at his bottom lip in a small smile and he tilts his head slightly. He finally laughs it off, “You do need some sleep, doll. Not making any sense.”

But you can see a cloud still in his gaze—he is thinking deeply about what you said, but just doesn’t want to admit it.

When he doesn’t say anything else, even goodnight, you go to McGucket’s room and crash into the bed after all but ripping your jeans off. The mattress squeaks and crunches obnoxiously in the darkness. You’ve kept the door cracked so that the bathroom light will come in.

You lay down and the sheets are too cold on your bare legs. You almost want to call out to Stanley and ask him to come up to keep you warm. You tuck your hands behind your head and under the pillow, hoping to tuck warmth in like that. 

Instead, you knock a finger into a book under a pillow. You pull it out and see it is a burgundy looking tome with a handprint on the front. Marked on the handprint is a single number zero. You frown and sit up slightly in bed and open it, riffling through the pages. You recognize the crap drawing and (somewhat neat) handwriting:

You have found McGucket’s diary.

You know that you shouldn’t, but you rationalize to yourself that this is just probably more research notes, so you read through it, starting with the most recent entry, which was earlier this day:

I’m afraid to leave them alone, but there’s seldom I can do to protect them, particularly from the rage that Stanford has allowed to poison his chest and mind. I’m not sure what it is, but it hasn’t lashed out yet. His eyes aren’t right like they used to be. I want to say he is possessed, but that is absurd. The Lord does not let these things happen in real life. I have crosses scattered in this house and some holy water somewhere. There is no way something this dark could have infiltrated our house. Perhaps it is a depression or personality disorder? I’ve never been one for psychology, so I don’t want to blame whatever is going on with him on his mind or anything that could be a disability. I do not wish to demonize him (no pun intended) over something like that. I would love to help him, if only he would talk to me. 

But Y/N and Stan. I don’t think they ever seen him like this. I think she has. Probably once. His eyes were strange for a minute when she first got here. And then it went away, almost instantly.

Oh, Stanley and Y/N…

I will be back soon. It will be fine.

I treat them well, I suppose. I think they are the good I have done in my life?

Can there even be a God if he’s allowed Stanford to reach this far into this possessed, forbidden madness?

*

An entry from a couple of months previous: 

I am afraid I have wasted the rest of my youth on this man and we have done nothing good. Lord knows the way I let him touch me is good—no one else would like to think that (if they knew), but I do. And it used to be enough. But the touches have become less as he spends more time away from me in the cabin. I know he must have a room somewhere else. He is nowhere to be found at all times of the day. I think there’s another room the elevator goes to, but it doesn’t go there for me. He is literally shutting me out of my life. Perhaps she can break him out of this shell when she gets here. I’m not sure how he feels about women, but I know the affinity he has for people with bright minds and who think only slightly differently than he does. Perhaps she will be good for the both of us.

I fear that the next time I wake up, I will be an old man and will have done nothing good with my life. 

What will be my redemption for these sins? 

Or will I find myself in Hell all along, just like Momma said?

*  
A few days before that one:

There’s nothing good about me. If I said there was, would I just be trying to make myself feel better?

I’ve never bothered trying to say No to Stanford or to make sure he doesn’t open this wormhole, commit this great abomination, this great sin, of plunging this far into the unknown. We aren’t meant to obtain whatever knowledge this portal of his is going to give us. We will be struck down by God himself once this machine is turned on.

*  
A few weeks before the last one: 

I’m certain that I could fix up the prototype of the memory gun and fix Stanford’s mind for a longer time now. he doesn’t seem right. The more ideas he has for this portal, the more leery I get. These ideas are not his own and I don’t know who he is working with. I’ve asked him where he’s getting them from, but all he ever says is, “in dreams, Fiddleford. In my dreams, that’s all.”

Yes, fix the gun, erase his mind once more while he’s asleep on the couch just like the last time…

But I’ll have to go to the bunker by myself to g I’m too much of a damn coward to handle any of that. I don’t know if IT is still down there. I would not be able to hand it. I would not survive…

*  
You flip back a few more pages and find the shaky, sloppy schematics of the memory gun in question. Below it is an unreadable date (it appears to be recent, within the past few months—it is at least in this same year). Below the scraggly date is the note:

Stanford is more like himself. The machine has worked. I don’t seem to be suffering from side effects, myself, from my initial test. But my dreams have been lucid and slightly terrifying since then. I have dreams about a deep bunker and an alien captain that Stanford has tormented for information and has kept in a cage. I feel we have visited something underground like this, with magnets, with runes. But I don’t know what parts about the dream are …

Heavy footsteps stomping all the way to the bathroom and the loud shutting of the door disturbs you greatly from read that you shut the diary. You roll out of bed and your feet take you to the bathroom without even really thinking about it.

You knock on the shut bathroom door. A slightly annoyed ‘yeah’ answers your knock.

“Can I come in?” You sound just as annoyed as he does.

“Oh, its you,” Stan say, looking at your reflection in the mirror. “Yeah, come on in.” He is in the middle of shaving when you shut the bathroom door behind you. He gives a hearty laugh as he looks you up and down and then asks, “What is this, the Pants Off Dance Off?”

“Shut up!” But you do realize you could have worn something more than the shirt you stole from him. 

“Can I help you?” He wants to know, leaning into the sink, still looking at you in the mirror. He’s in a white tank top and you see all of his muscles and body hair and fight away a flush and a memory flash of your closet experience with him.

“I found McGucket’s diary,” you tell his reflection. 

You can’t tell if he’s raised his eyebrows because he’s interested or if it’s just the way he holds his expression when he shaves.  
You sit the diary onto the part of the sink he isn’t pressed against and he looks at it while he works the razor on his face. 

“You shouldn’t,” Stan says, sliding it closer to him and flipping it open after he finishes a line on his face. He squints down at the pages and you fight back a smart ass remark about him needing glasses. 

“I already did,” you tell him, meaning that you’ve read.

“Hoho, you?” He smirks at you. “Didn’t think you to be the prying type, doll.”

“I don’t think Hadron has been okay for a very long time, Stanley. Before either of us got here, even…And Stanford—the most important person in his life—doesn’t notice how scared and alone Hadron has been.” You open the journal up to point out some of the passages you’ve read and watch Stan’s half-shaving creamed face fall into a look of pity and sadness. “Someone so good, so nice,” you continue. “He doesn’t see any of this in himself. But he still goes on to do what he can to please your brother.”

You say this in an accusing manner and Stan’s gaze jerks away from the book and he looks a heated gaze into your eyes. You’re surprised he doesn’t say anything to you about this. Instead, he goes, “My brother isn’t a great person, Y/N. Its so easy to ignore that because of what all else he is.”

“What is he, then?”

“A monster,” Stans says nonchalantly, going back to shaving. 

You sit on the closed toilet seat lid and watch him shave.

“He’s a monster, Y/N, but he’s so damned interesting.”

You almost don’t hear what he’s saying to you, too wrapped up in reflecting on everything you know about McGucket, wondering if his behavior, his words, his feelings, have all been a lie.


	7. Flash Delirium (Part I)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the reader is feeling terrible about being in the house.   
> Title is from MGMT's 'Flash Delirium'.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "And even if this hall collapses,  
> I can stand by my pillar of hope and trust...  
> That our heads won't bust."  
> -MGMT, 'Flash Delirium'
> 
> \--
> 
> Thanks to everyone who is still reading this story.

\---

 

You leave Stan with his shaving and go back to McGucket’s room. This time you shut the door behind you and even think about locking it, but don’t. You lie back down into the cold bed and shift to your side. The bathroom light is still streaming in through the crack under the bedroom door and you see a shadow flit across it from time to time as Stanley paces around the open bathroom. You shiver, thinking about the shadow you thought you saw when you were standing at the top of the steps and speaking with Stanley. Perhaps it had been Ford haunting the halls…

 

You have McGucket’s diary hugged against your chest when you hear water in the shower start up and Stan groaning as the hot water covers his body. You flush slightly, seeing him in your mind in the shower, and think about joining him, if anything, to warm up…in more ways than one. You feel upset, but you don’t know why, and there’s something about Stanley and his hard body and gruff voice that makes you want to be with him or for him to soothe you.

 

The longer you stay in bed with your thoughts half-way surrounding Stan, the longer you stray to thinking about reading more of the diary’s contents and you hug it closer to your chest—you’d already read _some_ , why _not_ read more?

 

You shift to lay on your back and listen to Stan’s shower from the other room. The water cuts off after a while and you hear the shower curtain rings slide in a muted _ting_ across the metal rod holding it up. He sighs heavily as he gets out and whistles as he dries off and dresses.

 

You wonder what kind of sleep-clothes he’s putting on.

 

You wonder what the number zero or letter ‘O’ means on the front of the diary and why a handprint covers it at all. Perhaps it is some kind of signature or trademark of McGucket’s and Ford’s. You’d never seen anything like it before—on any book you’ve ever read—or on any of their work you’d gone through.

 

You tuck the diary back under the pillow you found it from, pressing it back against the headboard for good measure. You drift off to sleep, but it’s the heavy kind, as though you’d been sick for days and fighting through severe cough-medicine induced fever dreams. You pull the comforter up over your head and tuck in warmth.

 

Sometime in the middle of the night, you feel Stan slide into bed behind you and curl himself into your back, slinging his arm around your middle, pulling you tight enough into him to where it was uncomfortable. You let out a small sound of protest and scoot away from him in a sleepy haze, and he loosens his grip around you, but doesn’t go anywhere.

 

\--

 

The afternoon sun tries to cut through a gray fog accumulated throughout the morning and illuminates your exposed cheek from behind the window curtain. A warm wave of guilt pools in your stomach—you should have woken up sooner than now. There is work you could have done, and most importantly, what if McGucket was home and needed one of you?

 

You stretch yourself out like a cat waking from a long nap in a windowsill, and turn to face Stan and get him up in turn. You should maybe ask him to start on some coffee—you feel like everyone in the house is going to need lots of it for whatever is in store for the day. Along with your queasy guilt about sleeping in, you have an unshakable feeling that something is going to happen today.

 

“Stanley…”

 

Except, its Stanford in bed with you and his eyes are open wide and swallowing the image of you, and it looks like he’s been doing this all night, even though you were facing away from him the entire time.

 

His eyes are pink, edging on red, like he has a case of conjunctivitis coming on and you feel your eyes water slightly from looking at them. His gaze is intense and too much, not unlike the time you first started coming to work for him. This gaze has been gone for so long that it’s so jarring to see it again.

 

“Ford.”

 

“You seem surprised.” He smiles slightly. There is scruff on his face, and his hair is a beautiful mess. You fight down the urge to run your fingers through it and pull him into a kiss.

 

He reaches out and slides his warm fingers, then palm, against your bare hip and presses his forehead into yours. You close your eyes and allow him to nuzzle into you. You almost smile, until he starts talking again, “I want to show you something today. Soon as McGucket gets back.”

 

Something cold clutches at your chest and you pull away from him. He suddenly feels like a stranger to you, and you don’t want him to want to show you anything at all. “Oh, yeah?” Is all you are able to ask.

 

“I’d like to take you down to the lab. And show you our finished project.”

 

Your adrenaline is rushing in your temples and your mouth is dry. This must be the project that Fiddleford mentioned to you on your walk with him. The one that he is away getting chemical materials for. All this time in the cabin working for Ford and McGucket, you’ve always been so interested in what _exactly_ it is that they do, but you’ve been able to wait to know about it. Hell, you even helped protect them from Preston Northwest figuring out what exactly it is they’ve been doing.

All the work you’ve done for them, going through all their notes. You’ve realized they must be into some weird shit. Potentially something with the occult, or messing with forces that you’ve always thought fictitious. After reading what McGucket wrote about bunkers and holding an alien creature captive (granted, if McGucket’s memory had really been modified as he indicated in his diary), you realized you _didn’t_ want to know what it is that they get up to.

 

You want to know where Stan is and you have a wild feeling that perhaps Ford has done something to him. You know this is stupid, and probably not true, but that’s how uneasy you feel in this moment.

 

“I sense you aren’t thrilled that I’m here,” Ford frowns and starts to pull his hand from your hip, now only his fingertips resting against your skin.

 

“I-I’m always happy to see you, Ford.” These words spill from your tongue and lips before you have a chance to even think about them and make them more believable.

 

“You just seem very distracted right now, is all. Not quite like yourself, my dear.”

 

And just like that, he seems himself again, with that simple phrase. My Dear. Its like he’s flicked a switch on in your brain and has quelled your anxieties.

 

“I’m sorry, Ford. I just don’t think I’ve been sleeping well lately. I’ve just been so tired.”

 

“You haven’t been having any bad dreams, have you?” He actually looks concerned when a crease of worry folds itself into his face.

 

You reach out to straighten his glasses on his face, and tell him no. No dreams at all, come to think about it.

 

“Well, I know how to fix that fatigue. I’ll make you some coffee.” He offers a small smile and you allow him to pull you into his chest in an embrace before he gets out of bed.

 

You sit up, cross legged, still tangled in the blankets when he gets out of bed and straightens out the day clothes that he actually slept in. You don’t move at all until he leaves. When you hear his footsteps and weight make the last of the stairs creak, you slide your hand under the pillow that you hid the diary under.

 

It is no longer there.

 

You rip all of the pillows off the bed and throw them across the room and fumble your fingers around the head of the mattress. You press your forehead against the wall above the headrest to peek into the space in between the head of the bed and the wall to make sure it hadn’t fallen through that way. Nothing was there.

 

You pull yourself out of bed and hastily throw the pillows back to where they roughly were, not worrying about straightening them up. You pull on yesterday’s jeans and tuck your (Stan’s) shirt in and slide through the hallway on socks full of fabric static.

 

\--

 

Stan and Ford are having coffee at the table in the kitchen by the time you make it downstairs.

 

“Yeesh, you gonna wear those same clothes for another three days in a row or what?” Stan quips from around his coffee cup with a sweet enough smile, and Ford shoots him a nasty look and mumbles something about that being Stan’s bad habit throughout their teenage years.

 

Stan rolls his eyes and looks at you. “No sign of Fidds,” he tells you before you can even ask either of them.

 

“Shouldn’t he have been home by now?” You want to know. You pour yourself a massive cup of coffee, but don’t even drink from it, which is totally unlike you.

 

Instead of sitting with them, you go to stand against one of the kitchen counters and watch them closely. Stan is squinting down at the newspaper’s sports section and you make a smart ass remark about how much he really does needs glasses.

 

“Dammit, I don’t need them nerd-goggles, Y/N! I told you!” But he says this in such good humor, trying to get even a small smile from you. It doesn’t work and you hate that it doesn’t.

 

Ford scoffs and pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “Give Fiddleford a bit more time, Y/N. Never know what he may have run into on his way home.”

 

“I’m worried that you’ve sent him off and have gotten him arrested. Or hurt, or he’s not going to come back.”

 

“Arrested?” Stan’s gruff voice cuts across the table and glances at you and his brother, but Ford speaks over him,

 

“I’ve done no such thing. He’ll be back. You’ll see.” Ford drains his coffee in his cup and gets up to get a refill.

 

You grip at your coffee cup and look out the small window in the kitchen. It’s gotten so dark, so quickly since you’ve woken up and the rain has rushed in.

 

“There was a book I had in bed with me,” you say casually, finally sipping from the green mug in your hands. The coffee is hot on your lips and tongue, but its good.

 

“The diary.” Ford’s voice is just as airy as your own as he fills his cup up again. You feel his gaze trying to penetrate through your eyes when he turns to look your way, but you refuse to make contact with him.

 

You glance over at Stan in a way you hope is discreet. Stan is staring at the newspaper, but his eyes are unmoving. A crease has not unfolded from his brow since McGucket potentially being arrested was brought up.

 

“I thought it may have been one of my journals,” Ford continues about the diary, “but I was mistaken.”

 

“What do you mean, one of your journals?” This time you do dare look at Ford. The redness in his eyes has gone away, but there is a darkness all around his eyelids. They look bruised and impossibly weary and you almost feel bad for him.

 

But he doesn’t say anything to you, or responds when you ask where the McGucket journal went. Stan clears his throat and licks the tip of his finger to thumb through the next pages of his paper.

 

You are absolutely irritated with the both of them. Ford is being a shit, and Stan is being useless. You excuse yourself from the kitchen with your coffee in hand and go to pick up the novel you’ve been reading on and off. You head outside, taking care to make sure the front door slams shut behind you.

 

Its been storming on and off, and thunder rumbles a soothing growl across the sky as you curl up on the couch on the porch. The wind doesn’t blow any of the rain coming down in sprinkles towards you and its pleasant out here. The slight warmth coming up from the grass that has grown back is nice. The humidity will come soon, but not for another couple of weeks.

 

The woods around the cabin are silent, sans the small baby goat that has taken a liking to grazing around the front lawn every so often. It usually scatters away like a timid deer when it notices you or any of the guys around, but your presence doesn’t seem to be bothering it now, and it folds itself up into a comfortable laying position in the grass near the porch. It bleats softly and looks at you with its yellow eyes before tucking its chin by its front hooves.

 

You go back to your book, trying really hard to avoid reading the same sentence over and over.

 

You get ten pages into your reading when low headlights cut through the dulling day. You look up. It’s the Jeep. You drop your book on the porch. The sound scares the baby goat and it runs off, bleating.

You run into the rain and throw yourself at McGucket once he’s outside of the Jeep. He holds you as tightly as he can. When you pull back to tell him you’ve felt so much in the hours he’s been gone, that his diary hurt you so much (to know he’s been suffering and he’s never said anything to you or that you didn’t notice at all), that Ford’s behavior and body language is so jarring and sometimes-scary, that you’re not sure you even want to do work for them anymore.

 

“Your face has blood on it,” is all you say to him.

 

“Oh,” he steps back from you and wipes at his nose and the corner of his eye with the back of his hand. “Most of it is dry now, darl’. No worries.”

 

“Yes, worries.” There is a lump in your throat, but you swallow it back. “Hadron. What is happening?”

 

“Help me carry this stuff inside, and we’ll tell you everything. If he doesn’t, then I will.”

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Part II will have McGucket going partially into the portal. It is going to be my goal to have Part II of this chapter up sometime this week.  
> A College/University AU crossover with Rick Sanchez (from Rick and Morty) and the Mystery Trio and Reader won't leave me alone and I'm going to try my hand at starting a new piece about that if that's something people would like to see. Please let me know in the comments.


	8. Flash Delirium (Part II)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Fiddleford is pulled partially into the portal, and relationships go to hell. Smut is in this chapter. 
> 
> \--  
> “You are the smell before rain/You are the blood in my veins.”  
> -Brand New, ‘The Boy Who Blocked His Own Shot’  
> \--

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I totally apologize if there are grammar/typo errors in this. I tried reading through it to catch them all, but at any point, with your own writing, it is hard to catch everything because you've looked at the same thing for so long!
> 
> I hope this chapter doesn't disappoint. It was a difficult one to write for sure! 
> 
> Also, I've taken liberty to make McGucket from Kentucky because that's where I wanted him to be from since that's where I'm from haha!
> 
> Thank you so, so damn much to everyone who is still reading this story and being kind enough to leave kudos and comments. :]

\--

 

Stan is covered in sweat by the time he’s finished with helping carry the mysterious and massive, metallic vat from the Jeep’s trunk to the cabin’s sitting room. You and McGucket watched from the porch, pacing to and fro in a near frenzy, not knowing how to help. And anytime you asked if Stan needed help with it, he would grunt out of everyone to shut up, please. By that point, Stan’s frustrations made it seemed like such a one-man job, especially when he managed to flip the vat long-ways and prop it against his back, and carried it in like that. You went to open the door, holding it in place, and McGucket promptly got out of the way.

 

“Don’t suppose you coulda got one of them dollies for this kinda thing?” Stan tugs at the hem of his loose white cotton t-shirt once the vat thumps into place on the floor. He brings his shirt up to his forehead to wipe away the perspiration there, showing his hard-soft belly, dusted in dark hair. His jeans fit snugly, and a the smallest amount of pudge pokes out at the sides.

 

“I’m sure there’s one somewhere in the house,” McGucket says uselessly staring at Stan’s exposed skin until Stan’s shirt falls back into place.

 

McGucket starts wringing his hands and shoots you a guilty and worried look over not being as helpful as he could be. He shuffles nimbly from foot to foot, as though he’s about to haul off and bring the dolly here.

 

“It’s fine,” you tell him, just happy he’s home and wanting to avoid unnecessary drama.

 

Stan gives you an incredulous look over his laborious effort, and then his face slackens as his sarcasm drips out dryly and professionally. “Yes, glad to have had your help in this matter, Y/N. Real piece of cake the two of us luggin’ in this cancer juice or whatever the hell it is in here.”

 

“It ain’t no _cancer juice_ , Stanley,” McGucket pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose, an indignant blush spreading across his cheeks. He crosses his arms across his thin frame and you notice just how weary he really is, and want to suggest that he maybe go lay down for a bit. It is, after all, the kind of day where you feel like you could stay in bed until it is time to get up the next morning.

 

“Yeah, well what is it, then?” Stan wants to know, his words curt as though he is speaking to his brother.

 

“It’s the juice to get our project flowin’.” McGucket says this in equal curtness, with a tone of ‘don’t ask me any more stupid questions—you know exactly what this is for.’

 

Stan rolls his eyes before resting his elbow on the top of the metal drum, and plants his cheek into his fist in a bored and impudent manner. “So now what?”

 

“We get this in the elevator and take it down to the lab.”

 

Stan shoots an overly amused and cheeky grin at you. “Ready for round two, sweetheart?

 

\--

 

You help Stan this second time, for some paces to the elevator. It isn’t as terrible as he made it out to be, and you assume its just Stan and his smartass way of wanting to bust everyone’s chops yet again.

 

The three of you stand smushed up together in the elevator, the vat in the front of you. Sloshing sounds are heard every so often, especially when the elevator stutters in a way that you hate and in a way that makes you believe its either going to crash or freeze and keep you trapped inside forever.

 

You help Stan tug the vat out once the elevator stops (thankfully) and opens again.

 

The elevators shut behind you and Stan grabs the metal drum by its shitty and useless handles, and lays it on its side long-ways to where he can roll it further to the destination the three of you are headed in.

 

“Feel like I’m walkin’ into my death over here, Fidds,” Stan grumbles, hunched slightly over, pressing hard, calloused palms into the chemical vat, panting slightly from its weight in front of him.

 

“No such thing, Stanley,” McGucket says, his hand caressing Stanley’s damp hair in a flash, and his palm resting on the back of his neck only for a minute, if that.

 

And the laboratory is both nothing like you thought it would be and everything that you thought it would be. Its very dim down here, and has a damp chill to it. You immediately cross your arms after rubbing at them briskly to create warmth from the friction. McGucket mumbles something to you about it needing to be cool down here at all times to help keep all the machines and gizmos from over heating.

 

“Is this a fallout shelter?” You ask, not even afraid if this is a dumb question, because the amount of tension and utter unknowableness and forbiddenness from simply being down here has you honestly believing that McGucket and Ford are about to tell you and Stand about a totally possible nuclear war to come and that they’ve invented some kind of weapon, or at least a strange scientific shelter to stay in until its all over with.

 

“No, darlin’, but you could use it as such iffn’ ya really needed to, I reckon. Would just need to bring non-perishables down here, I s’pose.”

 

Though it is dim down here, harsh red, blue, and white flickering and chattering lights flash, pulse, or stay steady, creating an inorganic and eerily semi-illuminated path from the elevator into the room proper.

 

When you get out of the crowded area just outside of the elevator, you really take in the scope and scale of the bunker-laboratory room down here. ‘Room’ isn’t even really the right word. It’s like a dungeon filled with electronic traps.

 

There are angular machines humming wall to wall, and a terrible metallic desk cluttered with thick books and papers. Pens litter the floor, along with balled up pieces of paper. Some of the papers look like they have been unraveled from these balls and were flattened out with heavy, angry fists before having been taped to monitors with black and cracked screens. It was like the macabre mirror of the way the living room upstairs looks.

 

Just looking at it made your stomach sour and brought a mouthful of hot saliva between your cheeks and nervous teeth as though you could vomit in a split-second. There is a disquiet whirlwind of everything good inside of you telling you to leave the room right now.

 

A triangular machine at the end of the room towers over all of you, resting not on its base, but impossibly on an angled tip. You feel a certain dampness clutch at your chest. A minute breeze from nowhere whistles foreboding and probable demonic hymns in your ear that pricks the hairs on the back of your neck. A menacing cold darkness striking into the light of your soul. Angry electrical coils and cords laying on the floor, wanting to ensnare, trap, wrap up and tug ignorant and innocent bodies into an abyss leading to nowhere, to everywhere, to hell.

 

And you find that Stanford has been down here the whole time, hunched over something on a desk. He is scribbling furiously in a thick journal—it reminds you of McGucket’s diary. He doesn’t get up from his desk to help with the heavy drum in any way and only looks up when Stan is finished making a spectacle of sitting it upright right next to Ford’s chair.

 

“You’re back,” is all Ford says to McGucket (to any of you), without looking at him.

 

“What the hell is this?” You finally ask, no longer interested in waiting.

 

Ford stands up in a huff, and brushes his lab coat back to put his hands on his hips. He is wearing six-fingered yellow gloves. He makes a sweeping gesture with one arm towards the triangular machine. “This is the solution to all of science’s conundrums, to the human condition itself. This machine will generate knowledge from dimensions beyond comprehension—even my comprehension.”

 

Stan scoffs, resting his arm on your shoulder and leans his body into your side. “Impossible, poindexter.”

 

“I thought so, as well, Stanley,” McGucket says softly from behind the two of you. “The research is all there. We’ve been workin’ on this for two or more years.”

 

“Yeah, but its all just theory, though,” you speak up. “Everything you’ve sent me to look at. Its all hypotheses. Just strange creatures, like birth anomalies. Its just strange biology, right?”

 

“This,” Ford says, dragging off the vat to the corner of the room and speaking to you with his back to you as he pulls on a gas mask and unscrews the vat’s lid, “is truly weird science, much like the weird fiction you read.”

 

“What, are you gonna drag out a Lovecraftian monster out of this hole and ask it how to cure the common cold?” Stan is still scoffing, but he pulls himself into you further and you feel him shiver. Probably from the damp chill down here, or probably from fear itself.

 

“Not quite, my dear brother.” Ford tips the vat’s spout to angle up to a drain-type hole in the ground. A heavy _glug, glug, glug_ sounds off while Ford goes on. “I’ve found the answer to this town’s source of anomalies—a rip in reality itself! This is a portal that we will be able to utilize for trans-dimensional travel to study far advanced species and races all from different places in time.”

 

“You’re crazy, this is crazy.” Stan says this simply, his body tensing up and hardening. You almost wonder if he’s about to fly off the handlebars and strike some sense into his brother. This is, after all, absolutely fictional.

 

“You shall see once we turn it on. We have a test dummy over here that we plan to send through to see if it works.”

 

“You can’t do this,” you say. “You don’t know where that thing is going to end up. You don’t know if its going to burn up, blow up, whatever.”

 

“I can, and I will do this, Y/N. Its been my life’s work.” He pointed over at his desk to where you eyed several journals, all with handprints and numbers on the front. The only time you’ve ever seen anything like this was on McGucket’s, and it makes you very sad to know that McGucket’s didn’t even have a real number on it—just a zero.

 

“You’re still young. You can find a new life’s work.” Stan licks his lips and his dark eyes dart nervously around the room in search of something, anything, to stop his brother from turning this nightmarish monstrosity on. “Fidds, tell him. Please.”

 

McGucket just shakes his head. “It’s a lost cause. I’ve tried before, Stanley. This must happen. The engineering is sound, I did it myself. This will work.”

 

Ford is super annoyed, and removes his gloves and mask as he comes back towards the front of the machine after flipping some switches and pressing buttons on a long motherboard. “The weirdness that leaks out into this town is coming from a rift of space and time. The hole was already there. I’m just creating a doorway.”

 

One of the last things you have to say feels like the most ridiculous and weakest argument in your arsenal, but you can tell that McGucket is right. This is a lost cause, indeed. “If fiction has taught us anything, it’s that all of this is a red flag, and you should never have been sickened by such hubris.” You spit this out at him, disgust wrinkling up your face.

 

Ford goes on as though you’ve never said anything at all, “Fiddleford, the dummy, please.”

 

Fiddleford goes to get it wordlessly. A rope is looped over and over the dummy’s neck. Ford takes the rope off the dummy’s neck and wraps it around its body instead.

 

“We must loop this along someone’s wrist,” Ford is saying, “just to keep a hold of the dummy. We must not come across this line.” He points at the line with the toe of his boot: it is yellow and black caution tape.

 

“I’ll do it.” Fiddleford says, being brave. “I don’t want ya’ll two tied up into this any more than ya’ll already are. Stand back, please.” He wraps the rope several times around his wrist.

 

The portal is warmed up now, and an eerie glow churns in a counterclockwise manner. It is now full-on freezing—the damp and gothic uneasiness has been coming from this damn thing all along.

 

The two scientists toe the caution line, and gravity fails the dummy, as the triangle sucks it towards the stirring hole to nowhere, to everywhere, to hell.

 

Only, McGucket is going with it. You grip Stan’s arm as Stan yells out Fiddleford’s name.

 

When he gets pulled towards the portal, Ford loses his grip on the rope, and he cries out when it leaves raw burn marks on his palms. “Help me, you imbeciles!” He curses at you and Stan, both scared to death and dumbstruck.

 

Ford finally gets a hold of the near the very end. Fiddleford’s terrified screams and please for help wakes Stanley up from his petrified state and Stan lurches forward. He wraps his arms around Ford’s center in a clumsy way, grounding his brother, trying to pull him (and McGucket) back. You push your way towards them, ignoring Ford’s warning about staying behind the caution tape, and grab the taut rope in the middle and jerk back with all your might, feeling your skin sear and blister in this excellent and miraculous effort.

 

McGucket and the dummy come flying back out. Stan loses his balance and hits the ground in a heavy thud—his head slamming the concrete is loud, but you don’t have time to worry about him. McGucket’s screams have stopped along with your heard. Ford falls on top of Stanley’s chest and you hear the air being knocked out of them both. You pinwheel your arms before falling against the top of Ford’s legs, landing on one of your wrists in a weird angle, but your adrenaline doesn’t let you feel any pain.

 

Ford Army-crawls over to Fiddleford, who is laying prostrate on the floor, his breathing labored, his hands gripping at nothing. You manage to roll yourself over there when Stanley does, and you notice how heavily dilated Fiddleford’s eyes are. You untangle the rope from Fiddleford’s wrist and throw it to the side. Stanley is beside you, and runs his fingers through Fiddleford’s damp hair in what he hopes is a soothing manner.

 

“What is it?” Ford demands of him. “Is it working? What did you _see_?!”

 

Fiddleford grits his teeth and shuts one eye and cries out gibberish, “YROO XRKSVI GIRZMTOV!”

 

“Fiddleford?” Ford repeats his name.

 

Words fly out of Fiddleford’s rattled mouth, “When Gravity Falls and Earth becomes sky, fear the beast with just one eye.” He shuts one of his eyes, as though for emphasis about the eye part.

 

“Fiddleford, get a hold of yourself, you’re not making any sense!” Ford grabs at Fiddleford’s shoulder, but for the first time, Fiddleford jerks himself away from Stanford Pines and sits up.

 

Anger like nothing you’d seen before paints itself on Fiddleford’s face as his hand flies to his shoulder where Ford just touch, as though he physically burned him. “This machine is dangerous. You’ll bring about the end of the world with this! Destroy it before it destroys us all!” Fiddleford grips Ford’s shoulders, staring intently into his face.

 

Ford shuts his eyes to avert the intensity of the other man’s gaze. “I can’t destroy this—it’s my life’s work.”

 

Fiddleford pulls himself to a standing position and heads towards the elevators. “I fear we’ve unleashed a grave danger on the world I’d just as soon forget. I quit!”

 

“Fine!” Stanford explodes and yells at McGucket’s back, “I’ll do it without you! I don’t need you; I don’t need _anyone_!” This last part was especially directed towards you and Stanley.

 

Fiddleford stops walking only once and says quiet, but enough for you all to hear, “You’re going to be sorry when you see what will come knocking at this door you’ve built, Stanford Pines. Hell, it may not knock for long. Anything behind it _will_ kick its way in. I guarantee it.”

 

You go to say something to Ford once McGucket is gone, but Ford holds his hand up. “Get out. Both of you.”

 

So you do.

 

But not before you swipe the journal with a zero written on it.

 

\--

 

 

Fiddleford is packing haphazardly when you make it upstairs. He is finding his random belongings and books strewn around the living room and stuffing them into an already over-stuffed duffle bag.

 

“I can’t stay here no more,” he says when he senses you and Stanley in the room with him after you get off of the elevator. You are sure both of you will never go down there again.

 

“You’re kidding,” Stan says, and you already know it’s the worst thing he could have said. Until he says the next part, “Come on now, Fidds. We didn’t let you get stuck in there. Y/N got you in time before you were sucked in.” You expect Stan to sound indignant, but instead his voice wavers in an unconvincing way and you notice just how pale his face is.

 

“I can’t stay here, Stan. Y/N. I just told you.” His shoulders slump and you feel a knife twisting its way through your gut. You also feel painful heat on your palms and in your wrist.

 

This gives you pause—you don’t think he’s ever called you by your actual name before. Only nicknames. He really is done, and just like Stanford’s machine, there’s nothing you can do about this.

 

“What did you see?” You ask softly.

 

“I saw enough.”

 

“What the hell was it?” Stan asks this more roughly, more forcefully than you would have liked to have heard. You swat at his arm and turn an apologetic face towards McGucket.

 

You follow up immediately, in a softer tone than Stan, “How do you know that machine will bring the end of the world?”

 

“Because I saw it, Y/N. I don’t know how or when it’ll happen, but it’ll come, and it’ll be Stanford’s fault and it’ll be my fault for doin’ everything he asked and for never standin’ up to him about this. This is my greatest sin. Now please let me be. I gotta get myself together. I’m gonna get some sleep and leave first thing in the mornin’.”

 

 

 

\--

 

You come to Fiddleford in the night, his diary tucked underneath your arm. You wonder if he’s noticed it gone at all. You remind yourself to treat him respectfully and courteously, not to treat him in a dainty way as though he’s now damaged goods—that anything non-normative is wicked, or tainted. He’s been through a scare, and you need to respect that, and take care of him any way he needs—he is your friend after all, and you love him as a friend, and as more.

 

You knock timidly at his door, like you hadn’t been there dozens of times before and like you hadn’t let yourself in each of these times. This timidness comes completely out of left field—perhaps you feel as though you’re at fault for any negative or upsetting things he may be feeling. Well, you are here for him to yell at, or you are here to soothe him—again, whatever he needs.

 

“I think you missed this earlier,” you tell him when you open the door slightly after he calls out a soft ‘come in’ when you tell him its you at the door.

 

He is smoking a cigarette in bed when you locate him stretched out on top of the covers. You are absolutely certain this is the first time you’ve ever seen him do such a thing. You feel the immediate impulse to go over there and smack it out of his hand. Almost as though reading your mind, he snuffs it out in the ashtray on the bedside table that you never noticed before. He comes over to you in his socked feet.

 

His eyes are wide and tired when he takes the diary from you and he tosses it into the pile of clothes sitting on top of his now lumpy and angular duffle bag that his hefty books will most likely poke holes through. “Thanks, darl’.”

 

“Where will you go now?”

 

“Back to California, most likely. At least fer a while now. Hell, I might even go on back home.”

 

“Yeah? Where’s that?”

 

“Kentucky.” He chuckled to himself. “Be home in time fer Derby. Its really somethin’.”

 

You smile, knowing what he’s talking about. “That sounds nice. I’d love to see that.”

 

“You could always come with me, ya know?” He looks at you hopefully. He raises his eyebrows in a persuasive way, “It’d be nice.”

 

You smile sadly at him. It tears your heart, rather than warms it, that he wants you to go with him, to run away with him. You don’t say anything, but apparently this tells him everything.

 

He nods at your silence. “I know.”

 

“What’s that?”

 

He opens the door wide enough for you to follow him in, and then he shuts it behind you. “I know you love us all, Y/N. But I know you can’t leave Stanley. An’ I know Stanley won’t come with me. He won’t leave his brother no matter what happens. That’s just how they are with each other.”

 

You don’t say anything. Yes, you love them all. But there’s something about Stanley, especially. Something about the way that he needs someone to look after him when he can’t look after himself. And there’s something in the way that Stanley is more overprotective of you than any of the other ones had ever been. There’s something that stirs in you far more when you look at Stanley or are even in the same room with him. It is there sometimes when you are with Ford, especially when he is himself. But Stanley has staked a spot in your heart you never knew existed before.

 

“Please stay,” you plead with him. “At least in town. At least for a little while.”

 

“I don’t want to.” He mutters this, avoiding your gaze.

 

You reach up to wrap your arms around his neck and hold you close to him. He’s rigid, but he finally relaxes into your embrace, and he pulls you onto the bed with him.

 

You roll yourself to straddle him and he shrinks into himself. Not in a way indicative of him not wanting you or not wanting you to be on him like this. He’s just shy, and always has been with you. And in the moonlight coming through the curtains, you can see his blush spreading furiously across his face and even to his neck. You lean into him and kiss his neck gently to show him everything is okay and to give him a chance to back out of this, if he wants to. He doesn’t.

 

When you trace a kiss to his throat, you feel his Adam’s apple bop as he swallows some nerves back, hard. His long, thin fingers find their way to your hips and slip under your shirt to trace stuttering and tickling lines across the small of your back. You breathe a quiet laugh against his chest, and he chuckles with you, slightly more at ease.

 

His bravery comes to his hands first, as they move to strip you of your shirt, and you press your soft, warm breasts against his chest. He groans at the contact, and his body stutters beneath you when you lean back a bit and trace your hard nipples over his skin in short lines and half-circles. He pulls you flush against him and bucks his pelvis into yours to show you just how much he wants you, without embarrassing himself with words.

You feel his hard cock against your groin and moan into his neck. He makes a desperate mewling sound and bucks against you. You tug your bottoms off and he shifts to pull his down. When you settle onto him again, his warmth is swallowing you whole, and you feel his precum leaking from his cock and tracing a delicious sticky stamp onto your inner thigh.

 

You roll your hips to where your wet folds are resting against his length. You start a slow pace moving against him, dipping the tip of his cock towards your entrance and rocking slowly against it. Your arms around the crown of his head, his face in your chest, leaving a trail of light butterfly kisses. He squeezes your breasts in a hungry manner and takes one of your hard nipples into his mouth and traces lightly with his tongue and teeth. You clutch at him hard, and slam your hips into his lap, taking in his full length in an unexpected movement as your lips crash into one another.

 

His girth in no way like Stanley’s and he doesn’t fill you or fulfill you in quite the same way. And this act is not a deep, animalistic, and hungry desire and passion that you’ve felt for Stanley (almost as instantly as you met him). Instead, its more so a heated kind of teleos pushing you to show Fiddleford just how much he means to you and how much you feel for him to do this to him and with him. And in the back of your mind, you realize this is the only way you could ever say the truest goodbye to him—with your affections and with your body.

 

“I’ve wanted you like this for too long, Fiddleford,” you groan into his ear, tracing your hot tongue against his ear and settling for nibbling at his lobe. “I just didn’t think you’d ever want me like this, too.”

 

“Its hard for me,” he admits through a small gasp that you find endearing. By this point, he is clutching at your hips hard enough to leave bruises and the strength surprises you.

 

His chest seems frail when you rest your palms against it to settle yourself and center yourself on him. Your wrist cries out in pain. His chest is thin, not as sturdy as Stanley’s, and doesn’t have much hair on it at all. You berate yourself—it is unfair to compare him to Stanley. But how hard is it to _not_ compare lovers, especially ones from recent memory?

 

Fiddleford pushes himself up on his elbows and leans towards you to kiss you deeply, then deftly on the mouth, murmuring against your lips. “I will always love you, Y/N, no matter where I end up.”

 

 

 

\--

 

You leave Fiddleford after your act of goodbye love, to clean up in the bathroom. The shower is cold, but soothing. You dress in some of Stanley’s clothes left in the clean laundry hamper over in the corner. When you leave the bathroom, you head towards Stanley’s bedroom, sure that he won’t be in there yet. Nights like these keep him up and pacing the floors for hours, and for several beer cans.

 

“How many times have you gone to them, and you’ve not come to me once?” Ford’s voice is behind you.

 

You whip around, heart racing, and see him at the top of the stairs, one hand on the bannister, looking at you intensely.

 

You answer him hotly. “I didn’t want to come to you with the way you’ve been lately, and it is absolutely none of your business.”

 

“They’re my boyfriends, too.”

 

“That’s a laugh, Stanford. You sure as hell haven’t been showing that lately. And how dare you pry like that? They have _never_ cared what I’ve done with you or the other one. They have never asked me, or each other. When was the last time McGucket asked you if you came to me or Stanley in the night?”

 

Ford doesn’t say anything, knowing that he lost this battle and should never have tried to start a fight over it. His next words, though, surprise you. “I apologize, Y/N.”

 

“You should, Stanford. You’re a real piece of shit. I hope you know that you’ve driven away one of the only people either of us have ever truly cared for and loved. I really hope you realize this, and that you absolutely could have avoided this.”

 

Stanford is silent for a while, studying you before coming up with, “We humans tend to think our everyones and everythings that we love the most will be with us until the end. It doesn’t always work out like that. The end always comes too soon.”

 

You don’t even know how to begin with responding to this, so you don’t.

 

He passes by you, brushing his shoulder against you as he heads to bed. “You have a good night, Y/N.”


	9. Tears Over Beers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the reader removes herself from the cabin and the three men currently ruining her life.   
> Then she literally runs into someone she hasn't even thought of in a while.
> 
> \--  
> Title from Modern Baseball's 'Tears Over Beers'

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So sorry for the lack of updates. I've had something to do literally every weekend for the past two months, including being in a wedding, so I have not had a ton of free time to work on anything other than boring adult stuff like chores (ew). I haven't written anything at all lately, and I feel like this sucks, but I hope to make up for it in the next chapter. I plan to budget an hour a night to working on this. 
> 
> Thank you for still reading, commenting, and giving kudos, everyone. :D <3

"All I can hope for is for you to get better,  
Because all I can take is no more.  
I'll hide where I can, away from you and your friends,  
leaking tears over beers once again."

 

-Modern Baseball, ‘Tears Over Beers’

 

 

 

\--

 

Sleep doesn’t come at all that night, especially after speaking to Ford in passing.

 

And how could you think that it would come anyway, after everything that has happened? You are on the verge of the kind of exhaustion to where you could start crying at any moment because of how tired you are. You haven’t felt this way in a long time, and it is even more disheartening that you feel that way in this house. This is the first living situation you’d ever had that wasn’t toxic or passive-aggressive or even aggressive-aggressive. This is one of the safest spaces you’ve ever known, not to mention peaceful and loving.

 

You ball your fists in your hands and feel the short nails dig into your palms. It sucks that something like this was obviously bound to fail. Its ridiculous. You feel as though you’re being punished for being in this series of relationships that people deem indecent, but that’s stupid. What you’re _all_ being punished for is Ford’s hubris—simple at that, nothing more and nothing less.

 

You want to punch something, but instead, push yourself up into a sitting position in the bed on the third floor attic. You grip at the flat pillow and twist your hands into the pillowcase, breathing deeply, trying to center yourself.

 

Your grip goes slack, and you lean against the headboard. The tired and last remaining bits of daylight comes in through the triangle-shaped window, illuminating dust floating around in the air, illuminating just how empty and solitary it is up here. A distant, loan floorboard groans out a creak in protest of holding someone’s weight downstairs, breaking the silence that holds only your bare-minimum breaks. It must be Ford or Stan milling about.

 

You shift to your knees in bed and peek out the triangle window and see Stan walking to his car. He is slumped, defeated, and just stands there looking lost in the dying daylight. The sky’s blood red and strained orange is ebbing away, making way for the moonlight and impeding darkness.

 

You sit at the edge of your bed and slip on your tennis shoes, not even bothering to throw on some socks, and pad out of the bedroom, stepping quietly down each staircase, and tread carefully to the front porch, and down the dirt path to where cars park.

 

Stanley is sitting on the trunk of his car with a duffle bag at his side. The strap is hanging slightly off his shoulder in a loose and realized manner while the wind blows hard. His longer and shaggier hair is tousling, but he doesn’t seem to notice. It is in this moment that you think about how nice it would be to have a camera to capture this piece of time and beauty.

 

He brings a can of Pitt up to his lips and takes a swig before spitting a seed out to the side. He crushes the can and drops it at his feet. He reaches into his denim jacket and brings out a small flask and takes a longer drag from that than from the soda. He puts the flask back in his pocket.

 

You’re not quite sure what to say to him, or if you should even approach him. You turn to go back into the cabin (not really wanting to be in there, either), but crack a twig under your loafer in this movement. Stan turns slightly around and calls your name in question, not even looking at you halfway.

 

You sigh and answer him. “I wasn’t spying on you—I just wanted to see where you went.”

 

“Just here is all, sweet heart. Come here.” He scoots over slightly to make room for you and you sit. The Diablo dips slightly under your weight, shifting it and then it settles again. You sit shoulder to shoulder and a certain excited fission flits through your abdomen, but it’s not as strong as you think it could be. He nudges you with his elbow to offer you his flask. You take a brief swig from it and wince slightly.

 

“How do you drink that all by itself? No way anyone actually enjoys that.”

 

“Years of loneliness, I guess.”

 

“Okay— _that’s_ not morbid and miserable.” You offer a small smile and jostle his shoulder with yours, trying to lighten the moon.

 

His chuckle is gruff and warms your chest. “I don’t disagree with ya.”

 

“So what happens now?” You ask. “Are you leaving, too?”

 

He sighs so heartily that you feel it travel through his entire torso. “I don’t know, Y/N. I can’t stay here. To tell you the truth, I’d be totally surprised if you decided to stay at all. Or even expect me to.”

 

“I don’t expect you to do anything.” You try very hard to not sound super defensive. “I know a lot has just happened, but—”

 

Stan starts shaking his head and stares out ahead of the both of you. Its like he can see some kind of melancholic void just beyond the trees that your own eyes have missed. The defeat is real, and there’s no coming back from it. You wish you could rally him out of this.

 

“What is it?” You ask, looking at the side of his face and early onset of stubble.

 

“I been thinking about what you said.”

 

You smile, confused. “I say lotsa things, Stanley.” You try to pass this off as lightly, something for him to even laugh at, to keep things at ease. But his somber countenance makes you sure that the conversation is about to veer in an opposite sort of direction.

 

He goes on as if you hadn’t said anything at all. No smile, no anything. In fact, there are new worry- and grimace-lines along the last few innocent and jovial spaces on his face. “You told me that its hard—always hard—to know if we do the right thing. You were right. You were right, too, about it being too late to know whether or not we _did_ the right thing. But you were also wrong, doll.” He turns to face you, his knee resting against the side of your thigh as his weight causes the car to shift him closer into you. He catches the bottom of your ear in between his thumb and forefinger and caresses you gently (almost as though he isn’t touching you at all).

 

His dark gaze catches your eyes and it hurts you to keep the gaze. The backs of your eyes are aching and burning—you beg yourself not to cry and not to even tear up. He doesn’t seem to notice and goes on, “You said what matters most is how hard we try. I don’t think we tried hard enough here, Y/N. I really don’t. I know I didn’t. And I know I should have. He’s my brother. I know him for what he truly is. And in spite of that all…I just wanted him more than anything. I wanted to be near him, I wanted to smell him, to hold him. To make up for the tens years that I lost him…And, monstrous or not, I didn’t care enough about getting out of him what he was doing. And if anyone shoulda been able to stop him, it was me.”

 

“They say hindsight is twenty-twenty. Sometimes, we do what we do in moments like that in order to protect ourselves. I don’t think you’re any better or worse today than you were the day before.”

 

He rests his elbow on his knee and presses his fist into his cheek, rolling his eyes. “Gee, thanks.”

 

“You know what?” You ask, jumping off his car and stand in front of him. He won’t meet your gaze. “I’m not going to sit here and masturbate your ego while you go on and on about how shitty you feel. If you really feel as bad as you say you do, you’d do something about it instead of sitting out here moaning and groaning, or even running away.”

 

Stan jumps off the car, too, and towers over you. His dark gaze bores into your countenance. “Do _you_ know what? The two of you deserve each other. I’m getting’ outta here.” He pushes his way away from you and all but rips the driver side of his car door open and throws himself into his seat, rocking the car, before starting the engine, and squelching his tires before tearing out of here, his rear headlights leaving a brighter red light stain on the ground now that the sun is gone for one more day.

 

\--

 

But you do stay. For another week and a half. You don’t know why, but you feel a strange sense of duty to finish up whatever work projects you had. In a regular job, you would normally have put in a two-weeks notice before quitting. So you think of it like this, even though you know that you’re rationalizing all of this in your mind as a mean to cling onto the last remnants of Ford and what your life once was here.

 

You spend most of our time in the strange attic room and sleep up there, as well. You come down for food at times that you are absolutely certain that isn’t going to be down there, or around at all. On the last night of your stay, you sleep in McGucket’s bed. Its just as unmade as it was whenever he was living here, and the pillows still smelled like his hair and it made your stomach churn and your chest growl in protest and in grief.

 

\--

 

Its dark by the time you leave the cabin for what you consider to be the last time.

 

You hitch your backpack further up onto your shoulder and grip the strap in one hand. The flashlight is loose in your free one, dangling at your side. If it weren’t for the many lights on in the cabin, you’d be standing in the pitch-black dark of the woods with nothing but the moon and stars to cast a faint glow. But even then, the obsidian sky swallows the path in front of you. You glance over your shoulder back to the cabin with a pathetic sort of longing. If anything, it’s the shelter you’d like. Perhaps you could stay through the night and instead leave in the morning.

 

No.

 

You don’t need it. You don’t need them. You never needed them. You’re beginning to think you don’t even need the memories.

 

You start your trek forward, treading carefully. Once you’re a good several dozen feet from the cabin, your thumb flicks the heavy, metallic flashlight ‘on’ in low mode, enough to keep sight on the uneven path ahead of you, if only to make sure there isn’t a massive tree root sticking up from the ground, waiting to yank you down.

 

A chilled breeze floats by, and the branches in the trees caress one another. The leaves snicker at you as you whip around at the sound of a nearby twig snapping. The leaves jostle, whispering your name in a breath that wind catches and then carries away.

 

The shadow grows taller or longer and you pick up your pace. The steps behind you grow heavier, swifter, as though the thing behind you is taking longer strides. You hope its just Gompers and that he’s perhaps put on a little weight and he’s trying to catch up to you. But you know deep down that the footfalls are sounding off something flatter and completely unlike four hooves stomping around.

 

It’s a person.

 

Or a monster.

 

‘No, dammit, Y/N,’ you tell yourself. ‘No such things as monsters.’

 

‘How do you know?’ You challenge yourself. ‘Who knows what’s out here, what Ford and McGucket have been messing with.’ It could be anything following you.

 

The wind comes at your face, chilling the back of your neck and then there’s warmth behind your ear that sends a sharp tickle of adrenaline that makes your throat warm with nervous saliva. You whip around, the flashlight tight in your hand and yell out, striking the thing behind you.

 

There’s a loud human yelp and then a thud of a body hitting the ground. Now is the time for flight or fight, and you’re too pumped up from this frightened rush that you’re no longer scared. You feel a foolish bravery take hold of your loins and you tower over the dark mass on the ground, ready to stomp down hard when you hear a loud, “WAIT! PLEASE!”

 

Your lifted foot goes back to the ground, but you do not relinquish your grip on the flashlight. You shoot its beam onto your near-attacker. It’s a young man lying on his back on the ground. His legs are drawn up (had he been on his side, he would have been in the fetal position), ready to kick his assailant in defense. His hands are splayed in front of his face, palms facing you. You lean closer, squinting your eyes at the person cowering below you and your steely gaze. His eyes are squinted nearly shut from the bright light.

 

“Preston?” You ask, surprise sharp on the pronunciation of his name.

 

“Yes. Preston.” He huffs this out in exasperation. You can even hear him rolling his eyes at you.

 

You slump into a relaxed stance, your adrenaline now ebbing away, but alertness not yet gone. You offer him your hand, and he grabs at it blindly with both of his in a clammy and desperate grip. The muscles in your forearm clench as you yank his dead weight up, helping him to his feet. You have no doubt the trees and other eyes in the forest are watching this encounter and your feet are itching to leave while you still have this surge of energy in your veins and muscles.

 

“What the hell are you doing following me out here?” You keep your voice low, as though there are others around that you may be disturbing.

 

“I wasn’t _following-_ following you. I’ve been lost. I saw your light. I assumed you knew where you were going, so I thought I’d just borrow your light.”

 

“You were following me.”

 

“Not nefariously. I wasn’t _stalking_ you.” He scowls at you and rubs at his forehead, where you struck him with your metallic Maglite. He is bleeding slightly and you almost feel bad for him.

 

Hell, when is the last time you’ve even thought about Preston Northwest and his absurd abundance of wealthy bullshit?

 

His hair no longer has its obnoxious and very privileged coif and sheen. It’s shaggier, disheveled and neglected. The bags under his eyes have aged him a good decade. He’s in the same Patagonia pullover from the day you met him, but instead of appearing brand-new, it looks so lived in, as though its something he sleeps in. He probably _does_ sleep in it. There are bits of leaves and twigs sticking to it from its static electricity and you wonder if he’s slept in these woods. The dirt on his crumpled khaki pants tell you that he has. How long has he been out here, and especially sleeping out here? Has he been living out here?

 

“What do you mean you’ve been lost?” You want to get away from this petty ‘following you or not’ argument, but also genuinely want to know what he’s doing out here.

 

“I got lost on a walk, I suppose.”

 

“How long ago?” You shine your light all over the length and expanse of his body, as though you could estimate that at all in this artificial light.

 

“I’m not quite sure, I’m afraid.” He squints annoyed at the light again, holding his hand up to shield his eyes from it. His voice is hoarse, like he hasn’t used it in days, and you suspect he’ll be whispering soon.

 

You pull your bag off your shoulder and rummage in it for the canteen you packed, offering it to him. He takes it into his shaking hands, fumbling with the lid, and then takes tiny sips with long breaks in between. His eyes bore into yours, and you see some kind of thanks there. You’re not miffed at him not thanking you verbally—more than anything, you’re surprised that he knows how to use a canteen and you tell him this.

 

He chuckles, “I’ll have you know, Father put me in scouts when I was very young. I have at least an elementary understanding of some things.” He takes another sip, this one a bit longer than the others, but he sputters on the water and coughs it up. It makes a sickening splatter sound when it hits the grass near your shoes.

 

He apologizes for wasting your water. “It’s the nerves,” he tell you, wiping at his mouth with the back of his hand before closing the lid and putting the canteen back in your bag and zipping it up. “My stomach just turns over everything. I couldn’t even keep down some blackberries I found in a bush over there somewhere.”

 

“You need to drink more in a little while. You’re probably dehydrated if you’ve been out here at least twenty-four hours.”

 

He shrugs at this and then fingers the cut on his forehead and examines their tips. The bleeding has stopped.

 

“I believe I should like to go home. You may come with me if you’d like. It seems as though you’re making a run for it, from the dream team at it were, and probably don’t have a place to stay for what’s left of the night.”

 

He’s right.

 

No way were you going back to your mother’s, especially after the way your tumultuous relationship seemed to have ended. You also are in no mood to hear anything like ‘I told you so’ since the your relationships have seemingly dissolved.

 

“I’m not making a run for it. I’m just…” But you can’t think of a good thing to say, other than confirming the finality of your relationships.

 

“Taking a break?” Preston offers with a small smile in the darkness. “Its fine. Everyone deserves a break now and then.”

 

You want to tell Preston that someone like him lives their entire life in a perpetual state of being on a break or on vacation.

 

“Mother used to take breaks,” he tells you when you start walking again. “Only she would call them ‘retreats’. They were either drinking benders that lasted weeks, or she would go and check herself into a rehabilitation center for her nerves. Places called Our Lady of Peace or something like that.”

 

“Is that what you did? Went on a retreat in the woods to take a break?”

 

“I don’t know what it is that I’ve been doing, Y/N. One of the last things I can remember is the masquerade ball. I remember coming around to Pines’s cabin, but cannot recall for the life of me what exactly I wanted.”

 

“You would come in the middle of the night and just stand there, looking up into the windows.”

 

“Did I?” He seems astonished, and you actually bought it. He seems sincere.

 

“Yes.”

 

“You must have thought I was drunk.”

 

“Or possessed,” you laugh at your joke.

 

He does not.  


And he doesn’t say anything else to you for the rest of your trek.

 

\--

 

Once you’re on his property, the first thing you notice is the fountain outside. The water is shut off, and what is left of it in the basin is full of peacock shit.

 

Preston doesn’t even fumble with keys—he just pushes the front door open. He walks in some, but stops in the middle of the room where the grand staircase starts at the bottom and then splits into two ways up towards the second floor.

 

“I’ve sent them all away,” he tells you once you follow him inside.

 

His arms are crossed, as he holds himself, rubbing at his biceps briskly. He uncrosses his arms and gestures around the very empty foyer, pointing at where nameless employees (‘the help’) would no doubt have been standing and waiting for him to shout out orders.

 

“I suppose Bartemius may still be around. The floors look clean,” he is muttering this to himself while you examine your immediate surroundings. It is completely unrecognizable from the party you and Stan crashed—it may as well not have been the same manor.

 

Some of the tables and statues around the entrance have been turned over. The once-beautiful greenery and bourgeois plants are now brown, their leaves and petals turning to dust when you accidentally step on the ones littered on the floor. You follow him further inside, and the main room is so unkempt. You try to place where the table with the masquerade materials were, where the tables with hors d'oeuvrs were.

 

“Did someone, uh, _multiple_ someones, break into your house, Preston?” You ask, brow furrowed as you catch glimpses of other tables and drawers looking absolutely ransacked. Or, like someone was looking for something. Even some of the paintings have been torn down from walls, or canvases have been defaced, canvases shredded.

 

“When I left, the door was wide-open. Our honorable Gravity Falls community must have blessed the Northwest mansion with a customary bum rush.”

 

“Why would you leave your door wide open?”

 

“I’m afraid I haven’t felt like myself for quite some time now. Truth be told, I’m not very sure. I think I just forgot to lock the door. I know that I dismissed much of the staff shortly after the ball. Very few resided here—just a select few, really, who have served this family for generations. Didn’t seem right to just up and get rid of them once Mother and Father passed away.”

 

“So you forgot to lock up your mansion. Full of things that the town could steal and sell. Full of things that the town would love the chance to bust up and destroy, given the chance, and judging from how your kind has always treated them.”

 

“This is a filthy world,” he sniffs, plucking a loose pocket square off a nearby side table, and wiping at his nose with it as though it were a tissue or handkerchief. “There are worse things that having material possessions come to harm…There are obscene terrors you could never fathom.”

 

“Yeah, someone else kinda beat you to telling me about that.”

 

He smirks slightly, and you don’t care for the look of it as he asks you, “Your science boys?”

 

You don’t answer.

His look softens, as though he’s apologizing for being an ass. “So, what are you going to do now, Y/N?”

You chew at the side of your cheek and think. You think about what Fiddleford said about going back home to Kentucky, and judging from the fact that he all but flew out of this town when he loaded up the Jeep with all of his possessions, you could only assume that that’s where he went off to. Well, massive fear of driving or not, you’re sure that you could make it there if you needed to, and you could look him up when you got there.

“I’m not quite sure what I’m going to do, but I know that I need a car.”

"I can help you get a car. Hell, I can give you one of mine. I have a dozen."

"Thank you, Preston, really, but I don’t need your help."

"You need money." He goes to reach into the front pocket of his dirty Patagonia pullover, no doubt going after his wallet.

“I’ll be fine, I promise.”

\--

 

 

 

“I’m thinking about how much I hate the statement that you never know what you have until its gone and that you never fully appreciate something or someone until its gone, or they’re gone.”

 

“Why do you hate that saying? Sometimes sayings are sayings for a reason, you know.” There is a kindness dancing behind his eyes, and a warmth that is flushed across his face. Perhaps it is just the heat and the light coming from the flames dancing in the fireplace, as he pours from a glass liquor decanter adorned with his family’s coat of arms. The two drinking glasses even have the coat of arms. The ice in the glasses are perfectly shaped spheres, and the brown-amber liquid fills the glasses halfway.

 

“Because,” you emphasize the word as you take the glass from him with a murmur of thanks, “I’ve always cared deeply for what and who I have in my life whenever I have them, and they still manage to slip out of my fingers.”

 

“I won’t tell you that you should have held on tighter. But I will tell you this: we all become just exactly what we deserve to be. In the end. Alone, or with company. Loved or despised. Remorseful and regretful, or content and satisfied. Even I. Don’t look at me so surprised, yes I recognize that I am absolutely with sin. I’ve never been without it.” He nods his head in the direction of a flag of sorts hanging nearby depicting flames and a triangle with an eye lording himself over people bowing and praying. It is a purely apocalyptic sight. “Born into it, more like.”

 

“What are you talking about?”

 

“Have you ever heard the name Bill Cipher?”

 

You shake your head slowly, but he cuts you off,

 

“You’ve not heard the name, but I assure you, you have been living with him for as long as you have been in that house in the forest.”

 

You laugh at him and drink the rest of whatever the hell it was that he gave you in the glass. “Preston, I think I’d be aware of another person living in the house with us.”

 

“Not if he was already living inside someone else.”

 

You turn to your side to face him, pulling the throw blanket further towards your shoulders. “Go on.”

 

He sighs, and lays in a comfortable way. “It all started when my ancestor, Nathaniel Northwest, sold not only his soul, but his familial descendants’, to a demon. I thought the curse was supposed to miss me.”

 

“Maybe you did the math wrong. Maybe it’s to be the next one. Like, when you have children.”

 

“I’m never having children.” He says this in such an impudent tone that he may as well been a very young teenager making the same declaration. “I see the way my parents treated me. I'm terrified to become them. Ringing bells, all this nonsense. Not being able to wear a certain color to dinner parties.”

 

Bells? Dressing in certain colors? Demons and ancestors? You are dying to ask him what exactly all this means. He speaks about them in a tone, as though you are aware of what these things mean.

 

\--

In the morning, you go to the auto shop that Preston recommended to you (owned by a southern gothic nightmare called Bud Gleeful) and see McGucket, and he acts like he doesn’t even know you. So you think he’s blowing you off. 

It isn’t until you go for a cup of coffee at the diner to mull over your other options that you hear the waitress, Susan, speaking to the older farmer guy, Sprott, about Fiddleford.

Apparently, Fiddleford has taken up with Bud Gleeful, using his brilliant skills to make halfway-decent repairs to terribly unsafe cars. In exchange for his services, he isn’t get paid a livable (or even working) wage, but Gleeful is allowing him to stay in the small shack on the property of the abandoned lot he owns. The lot is slowly morphing into a junkyard where most of the work on the cars is conducted. But Fiddleford seems ill. People seeing him around town notice that he’s starting to look terrible, like he’s stopped taking care of himself, but they equate the behavior to be something like being upset over a breakup with the scientist in the woods.

 

You leave money for your tab at the counter and you think about what McGucket said in the lab that day about wanting to forget what he ever worked on with Ford. And you’re almost pissed off at yourself for not even thinking about the strange diary entries and the memory gun.

You’re definitely going to the junkyard in the night.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wanted reader to have interactions with someone else besides Stan, Ford, and Fidds. I also really, really like Preston (or at least, my head-canon of Preston) and am trying to redeem him in someways.
> 
> Again, thanks for reading.


	10. Unsteady

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Reader spends some more time with Preston and has encounters with the Mystery Trio.
> 
> -
> 
> “Hold  
> Hold on  
> Hold on to me  
> 'Cause I'm a little unsteady”  
> -X Ambassadors, ‘Unsteady’

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am so sorry for taking so long to update. I have been through a lot since the last update. I was laid off from my job at the university and I've been spending a TON of time writing different cover letters and analytic writing samples and applying to jobs that I just did NOT have the energy to do anything creative, let alone write. 
> 
> I'm sorry if this chapter is not up to par!
> 
> Thanks to everyone who has read, is reading, and is still reading/keeping up with this mess.
> 
> \--  
> Title from X Ambassadors song.

Your first thought about McGucket’s diary is with the cabin in the woods. If he neglected to pack it on his way leaving all of you, then it would be somewhere in what used to be his bedroom. No way are you going back there, at least for another few days or so. You don’t relish the idea of running into Ford and his absurd, Byronic moodiness.

 

‘Or the other person you’ve been living with. The other _thing_. The _thing_ that has been living inside of Ford.’ These thoughts chill you to the bone and you hate Preston for saying anything this creepy to you. Something that could seep so easily into the front of your mind.

 

No, instead, you stick with your plan of sneaking into the junkyard tonight. And…do what? Talk to McGucket? What would you even say? Well, maybe that’s something you could figure out when you get there. Spur of the moment, thoughts derived from the passion of seeing him again.

 

But, of course, anytime one does something at night in particularly dark areas, one needs a flashlight. Which is something that you have left behind at the Northwest Manor. How could you have left that behind this morning when you were so gung ho on leaving this town for the final time?

 

Preston was still sleeping on the floor in front of the fireplace when you woke up on the couch this morning.

 

When he saw you were already up, he said something like an apology of there not being breakfast ready.

 

“Did you really never learn how to do these things for yourself?” You asked this when you were tying your shoe laces. Blood rushed into your already aching head and the only thing to sooth it was caffeine and water—both of which you planned on getting at the diner, away from him.

 

“I never needed to. Mother told me there would always be people who knew how to do things like this. People who needed jobs.” He stretched out onto his stomach and covered his head with one of the sofa’s throw pillows.

 

“You’ve seriously never cooked anything for yourself?” You were amused and wondered if this had anything to do with guys being brought up believing that they innately do not have the skills to do anything domestic. You thought about Ford and Stan and McGucket and their lack of cleaning skills, and also how they couldn’t cook anything other than pasta.

 

Preston told you that he would most likely be staying in bed (or on the floor) for the rest of the day. After you’d dozed off, he kept drinking and watching the fire until he was either too tired or too drunk to sit up comfortably. Knowing how he is when he drinks heavily (from the party you went to) you’re surprised that he actually remembered to put the fire out when you woke up.

 

You hope that he is good on his word and is still in the house. It’s not like you have his phone number or even access to a phone right now to call him and check on these things.

 

\--

 

Preston is indeed still home and has migrated to the couch. He is laying on it, feet dangling off the side of one of its armrests. He’s sipping gingerly from a tall glass full of ice and what you hope is water. The massive and dramatic curtains that enshroud the picture windows in the living room have been drawn shut, leaving the room dim and hard to adjust to.

 

“You’re back.” He doesn’t sound surprised. He looks like a child gazing up at you when you make your way to the couch. He’s holding his glass with both hands, careful not to have any spills.

 

“You’re up.”

 

“Barely.” He groans as he manages to get to his feet and stand near you. “What are you doing here? I thought you were ditching town all on your own. An independent woman who doesn’t need a man for the rest of her natural born life and all that.”

 

“I’m…here to check up on you,” you finish this sentence somewhat lamely and you can tell that he’s seen through your lie as he squints his glassy gaze into your eyes.

 

“No, you aren’t.”

 

You don’t say anything. You’re itching to find what you need and get on with devising a plan to get to McGucket in the evening. You’re distracted by one of the peacocks strutting across the living room, in search of an upturned serving platter that once held crackers.

 

“Yes, I am.”

 

“Well, if you care so much about me, perhaps you wouldn’t mind helping me out with something.” His finger traces a circle around the glass’s rim, eyeing you coyly.

 

“Sure, yeah, of course.”

 

“My family owns a weekend home over off the lake. Would you like to go there with me? Nothing like the fresh air to cure a hangover. And a friend to speak to.”

 

“What, like go on a vacation with you?” You also wonder (and marvel) at how Preston Northwest could ever consider you a friend.

 

“No, just a small day trip. Same kind of deal you’d have going to a park or something on a Saturday.”

 

“Except in a multi-million dollar home.”

 

“Not a million dollar home. My great-great grandfather built it with some of the town’s early foremen. He built most of the town, you know.” His says this with such emphasis on his brow that you can’t deem it unbelievable.

 

“I didn’t know that.” Only you do know that—most people in the town understand just how much gratitude they must have for the Northwests and the legacy that built, sustains, and develops Gravity Falls. “Was he the only person in the family who ever understood what hard work is like?”

 

He narrows his eyes at you and you can’t tell if he’s doing it in a mock-annoyed way or if he’s really annoyed with you.

 

“I don’t really want to go there with you, Preston. I don’t really have the time, to be honest. I have business elsewhere.”

 

“What kind of business?” This interests him far more than your visit.

 

“Its private.” It is either the best or the worst answer you could have come up with.

 

“All business belongs in the public sphere. Go on, tell me about it.”

 

“That is an idiotic thing to say.” You shift your weight to your other leg and your eyes sweep the sitting room in one wave, looking for the Maglite. “Fuck it. Fine. I only came back to get my flashlight.”

 

“I knew you weren’t here to check up on me.”

 

Your gaze lands on it over on the fireplace mantle, but Preston sees it at the same time and is much faster at you. He takes one long side step and scoops it into his pale, long-fingered hand.

 

“You can have this back after our day trip to the lake.” He doesn’t quite dangle it over your head like a school yard bully would with their victim’s prized toy or ball, but he sure is damn close to it.

 

“Its _my_ property!” You actually hop and swipe at it, but he jerks it out of reach.

 

“Which is in _my_ home.” There goes his entitled and bratty tone that you missed so much. “A home you came to with the full intention to burglarize.” The glint in his eye is dangerous and your gut actually has a guilty pull to it and you feel bad for even thinking to come back.

 

But you find your voice somehow, and stay steady while pointing out how ridiculous he sounds. “Burglar my own property. That’s rich.”

 

“You weren’t invited in,” he raises his eyebrow so as to challenge you. That’s fine. You could do this all day.

 

“The open door welcomes all burglars all times of the day. Robbers, too.”

 

Preston is rolling the heavy flashlight around in both hands. Finally, he holds it out to you like a wand. “Lake house or no flash light.”

 

\--

 

You are sitting in the long kayak with your crossed arms resting on your chest. The midafternoon sun is surely giggling at your predicament as you sweat through your shirt. Its glare is slowly giving you a headache as you try to avert your gaze and take in every sight besides the sky.

 

The Northwest weekend and summer home looms over the top of a nearby cliff which looks like it (the house and cliff) really belongs on the coast of an ocean somewhere.

 

“Isn’t it just beautiful out here?” His voice comes from a far-off place as he pays more attention to everything else going on around him and rows on autopilot.

 

“Its hot.”

 

But he’s right. It is just beautiful out here, damn him. The Douglas Firs and whatever else trees are too full and green already. A bunch of baby ducks following their mother around is too adorable. And there are hardly any other people out here on a day that you think would otherwise be packed with tourists or locals and their screaming children.

 

“It isn’t _hot_. Besides, you have a nice breeze every now and again.”

 

“Yeah, more ‘agains’ than ‘nows’.” You sniff this out and hate how much of a brat you’re being.

 

More than anything, you’re irate that it _is_ such a beautiful day, and kayaking is something that you’ve always wanted to do, but somehow never found the time or gumption or bravery to do so. So, screw Preston for making you do fun things and forgetting about all the awful things that have happened lately.

 

“This may very well save your life one day.” The sun glints off of Preston’s sunglasses’ shiny lens on the top of his head as he paddles the kayak forward on the lake.

 

It’s a weirdly hot day, but the small breezes blowing up from the still waters are refreshing, despite the many beads of sweat rolling down your temple and neck. Preston seems to be ignoring his and the drops darken the fabric of his shirt.

 

“Really.” You say this, bemused.

 

It doesn’t seem very well likely. Really, you feel like he is ‘teaching’ you how to do this just so he can spend time doing something that he wants to do, and you are just literally along for the ride. And you are serving as something he always seems to be in direct need of: an audience.

 

“Oh, yes. You never know the kind of environment you’re going to be in when you need to make an escape.” His sunglasses fall from the top of his head to his face, resting upon his nose in a slightly askew manner.

 

You reach forward and straighten them out. His smile is thanks enough, and you wonder how someone so charming can be such a shit a lot of a time. And you wonder how someone so lonely can easily fall into a comfortable rhythm of camaraderie with a near stranger such as yourself.

 

His legs are thin and pale beneath the shorts he is wearing over his swim trunks. His orange vest is bright and loud over the lime green Lacoste polo shirt with the collar popped. His boating shoes are damp and untied. He looks, again, like an overgrown brat. But, he is definitely growing on you…dammit.

 

He grins and taps your shoulder with the end of his paddle, dripping some lake water onto your own cotton shorts. He offers you the paddle, asking non-verbally if you’d like to give it a go.

 

“I don’t think I’m going to be a master at this,” you say, swatting the paddle away and he dips it back into the water with enough grace to not splash you. “Doesn’t this take years to become good at? The kind of thing you learn how to do from years spent at camp with other polo-wearing children?”

 

“Well, _everything_ takes a while to be good at, doesn’t it?” He rolls his eyes at your summer camp quip. “No, this exercise is to help you be less afraid the next time you’re in the water, and to give you the basic knowledge of what to do next.”

 

“If I ever find a canoe or kayak just laying around.”

 

“Shut up.”

 

“No, that’s very practical of you, Preston.”

 

“Thank you for saying so.”

 

He takes you out to the middle of the lake and it is too quiet, so you wrack your brains to find something to talk about. You both probably don’t have much in common with one another so something like books or film or the arts are probably off the table.

 

“How long have you been coming out here?” You’re surprised at just how curious you are about Preston’s past.

 

“Ages, I suppose. For family vacations, birthdays, graduations, weddings—not my weddings. I guess I’ve been coming out here ever since I was born, but I can’t remember any earlier than elementary school. To tell you the truth, I hated coming out here with my family. And there’s something eerie out here. Not unlike those woods you lived in.”

 

“What is it?”

 

“I don’t know. Nothing? Everything? Something just chills me to my soul out here.” And he actually shivers. You don’t know if it is for effect, and how often he’s practiced this story in front of others.

 

“Do you have siblings or anything? Or anyone to come stay in the house with you? To keep you less scared, I mean.”

 

“No, I’m alone. At least I am now.”

 

“What do you mean by that?”

 

“I think you have a good idea.” He actually looks taken aback, given your previous conversations.

 

“Oh,” you snap because it rubs you the wrong way. “Tell me what I’m thinking, then.”

 

“About the same unwanted visitor plaguing your dear Stanford’s dreams and demeanor. A demon older than time, traversing worlds.” His hand is up and his outstretched fingertips trace a line in the air at those last words.

 

You want to protest and before you can even make a sound, he interrupts you.

 

“I know what you and your friends have been working on. And whatever I could _ever_ tell you is no more fantastical than whichever rips in reality’s fabric you’ve come to realize. Believe you me—I wish I could unsee or forget everything I now know. Things we aren’t supposed to know.”

You now realize that some internal suffering has done him some good at least in terms of introspection and reaching some level of self-actualization. How could someone like Preston grasp this epistemic enlightenment, but not someone like Stanford Pines?

\--

 

You go up to the house to eat.

 

You have old cans of clam chowder that taste slightly of metal for lunch, and when you heat them up on the stove, there is a stale burned smell that permeates the first floor of the house. Preston says that happens sometimes when the stove hasn’t been used in a while.

 

You ask him when he plans to leave or if he’s thinking about spending the night here.

 

“I may very well stay here for the rest of the week. I don’t want to go home. I can’t sleep there. I don’t even want to be there at night. Even the slightest sounds scare the piss out of me. My heartbeat rattles off a smoker’s arrhythmia.”

 

“Okay, Tennyson.”

 

“Excuse me?”

 

“I just…its, you were being too poetic right then. I was poking fun of you.”

 

“Oh, I don’t think you’re capable of doing something like that.” He says this so seriously that you almost miss the sarcasm and joke.

 

Preston decides to take in the late afternoon after you’ve both eaten. His hangover has dissipated, but a slight headache has returned, probably from being in the sun all day. You feel slightly burned, either from the sun or the wind, but decide to go back outside (with flashlight in tow) just in case you decide to run for the hills. You’ve held up your end of the deal, after all.

 

Instead (for now, at least), you decide to try the kayak thing out by yourself around sunset. If anything, you plan to enjoy the sky now that the sun will be on its way out.

 

It’s a Sunday and most people have since packed up and headed out. Grandparents are taking their grandchildren back to parents who had a rare free day. Soon, you will have the lake (and the glorious nature around it) to yourself.

 

But, as people are getting out of the water and packing up coolers with pruned fingers, another person is still in their boat, fishing. You decide to paddle yourself over there, make it a small goal of learning how to take command of this small boat, and then paddle back. You may even alert Preston of your progress.

 

But the closer you get, the more familiar the fisherman looks. The broad shoulders, the flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up over muscular forearms, the dark washed jeans, a booted foot resting upon the edge of the small fishing dingy.

 

“Is this yours?” You blurt this out when you get close enough in the kayak—you don’t know how he hadn’t noticed or heard you approaching, unless he was ignoring everything on purpose. “I didn’t take you for the fishing type.”

 

“No, I’ve rented it.” He reels the line in and lays the pole aside. He plants his palms on his thighs and looks at you with his head tilted to the side. “Ford or I never told you about growing up on the shore in New Jersey? We used to be pirate kings, you know.”

 

“That’s a creative lie.”

 

“Mostly true. What the hell are you doing here?”

 

“I guess I could ask you the same. Why are you acting like a stranger?”

 

“I’m not acting like a stranger!” There’s a splotch of red flaring up on his nose as he steadily becomes more indignant.

 

“So, what are you doing here, then?”

 

“I _was_ fishing before you scared everything away.”

 

“Oh, so sorry about that.” You hate the way your voice sounds right now—curt and callous and sardonic. You hadn’t even thought about ever seeing Stanley Pines again, let alone allotted yourself time to rehearse in your head just how you would treat him or what you would say to him.

 

He throws his hands up, open hands near his head in a shrug. “Okay, so I couldn’t leave! Sue me.”

 

“Like I could afford a lawyer.”

 

He chuckles. “Right. Heh. Its good to see you again, kid.” You can hear the embarrassment grumbling from out of his chest. This isn’t easy for him to say to you and you appreciate the effort. You didn’t exactly leave one another on the best of terms and he wasn’t particularly kind with the way he peeled away from you in his car.

 

You want to get on him about that ‘kid’ remark and tell him there’s not much difference in your ages, but the term endears your heart in a vice grip. It’s more than you expected to ever hear and its almost as good as the ‘sweetheart’ you used to be to him.

 

“Its good to see you, Stanley.”

 

“Thought I saw you out here with Preston Northwest.” He points vaguely towards the shore; probably towards whichever house he believes belongs to him.

 

“That was I. I’m afraid to say we’ve somehow become friends,” you continue with your story despite Stan’s aghast expression. “I left my flashlight at his house and he held it hostage until I would come out here with him.”

 

“That don’t sound like friendship to me. What the hell are you doing with a flashlight?”

 

“I’m going to sneak into the lot that Fiddleford is staying in. I think he’s losing his memories. He totally blew me off the other day.”

 

“Oh, what fresh hell is this?” Stan pinches the bridge of his nose and closes his eyes.

 

“He’s doing it to himself, Stanley. I read about it in his diary. He’s made some kind of ray gun that erases your memories.”

 

“ _What?_ ” You can’t tell if he is annoyed or if he finds unbelievable to the point of something needing to be done.

 

“Yeah. And I feel like if there are schematics in that diary, there must be answers that show how to correct or regain lost memories.”

 

Stan reaches across to you, his hand and fingers wrap around the top of your forearm. “Bet that book is long gone, Y/N. So don’t get no idea about goin’ and breakin’ into my damn brother’s house just to get what ain’t even there.”

 

‘What is it about these guys thinking you’re a robber?’ You ask yourself.

 

“Bet not,” you say. “Your brother has journals of his own. I’d be willing to give up whatever small fortune I have left betting that he would know how to fix this and fix Fiddleford.”

 

“ _Fix_ ‘im? Looks like he’s much happier there. Oh, yeah! I saw him the other day! Went and got a part for the Diablo. Hell, I ain’t seen a face that calm since I used to watch those goofy soaps TV.”

 

“Nobody who lives in a scrapyard can be happy.”

 

“They are if they forgot about every single trauma that ever happened to ‘em. What exactly do you want with him?” His eyes are pleading and sad, begging you to drop this and to leave the other man alone. “You want to jolt or fry his brain with all the bad stuff so he can remember you enough to run away with you?”

 

You did _not_ expect this. “I don’t know. I just don’t want him to forget himself. Who he is. Who he was.”

 

“And what makes him more deserving than me to run off with you, anyway?” Its like he didn’t even hear what you just said, which is so totally Stan Pines.

 

“Stanley, you have always wanted to run so badly. Run so far away, run away from life itself. Ran from one end of this country right to the other. And now, all of a sudden, it looks like you’re staying. But now that _I’m_ thinking about leaving, and with someone else, you’re all of a sudden ready to put gas in the car and get the hell outta dodge.”

 

He holds his hand out in a way that says ‘listen’. “Look, I can’t do this right now. I need to take this boat back. I’ll see you around.”

 

You watch him paddle away from you and the pang of sadness that hits your gut is palpable and you almost taste it in your mouth. You paddle Preston’s kayak back. You didn’t get to enjoy the sky, and you officially hate the lake.

 

\--

 

Its almost full dark by the time you make it to the scrapyard. There’s a shack (that’s the only term you have for it, how could it be anything else) up ahead with a dim light visible from the window. You are crouching down on your haunches and squinting into the night. You really should have brought some binoculars. You think about waiting to come back tomorrow night after purchasing a pair sometime in the morning. But you feel like the longer you wait, the less likely this is to happen. Everything is still; it seems like McGucket is the only one there. Perhaps Bud Gleeful doesn’t think anything in the yard is valuable enough to warrant a dog or a large man that Preston alluded to (whatever the hell he meant with that).

 

You worry about hopping the fence, but notice that somewhere along the line, someone has take shears or bolt cutters to the wires and made a massive cut, rendering part of the fence into a passable flap. You all but somersault through this, trying to avoid being sliced or scraped by the cut metal and come out unscathed.

 

You creep up to the shack and think about peering into the window to make sure he isn’t asleep. You have no intention of startling him awake…

 

But, you’ve deliberated too long and the front door is opening. He sees the beam from your flashlight and all you hear is a confused ‘hello’. You can’t really see his face or anything. You jump to your feet and lower the light so you can see each other.

 

“Sorry to bother you this late, Fiddleford. I’ve been trying to find a way to get in touch with you for several days now.”

McGucket narrows his eyes at you as though you are something foreign to him, yet slightly recognizable. "I’m sorry darl, but have we met?" He chuckles this out and you notice some lines in his face, deep behind his days old stubble. Its hard to discern the stubble from the dirt. He smells like he hasn’t showered in about a week. 

“Yes, we’ve met. We are really close friends.”

He’s shaking his head, face completely somber. "I’ve seen you in town…but I don’t know. You’re making me nervous being here this late. This ain’t even my property. Please go, or I’ll hafta call Mr. Gleeful an’ tell him about a trespasser.”

\--

So you really aren’t surprised to find yourself basically knocking down the cabin’s front door. You have totally lost McGucket, and this is the only place you think will have the answers.

It must be close to two in the morning and you don’t expect there to be an answer at all. You think about the crawlspace under the porch. That should lead straight into the lab…

“Y/N?” Ford answers the door and rubs at his eyes from behind his eyeglasses. His hair is even fluffier, and very mussed from being in bed. He’s only in his boxer shorts and a t-shirt.

You don’t say anything for a long time. Why has it felt like you haven’t seen this man in years, even though its only been days?

“I know.” He says this so coherently that it doesn’t seem like he had ever been asleep at all. “You’ve probably come back to declare just how much you hate all of the fighting that has occurred here and that you wish we could all magically fix everything. Right? So, tell me. What troubles are plaguing your too-big heart today?” Stanford Pines’s arrogant tone is as familiar as ever, and the way he adjusts his glasses pedantically is almost nauseating. But, you’ve missed him (at least the old him) like hell and want him to be better.

 

You lurch forward abruptly, but with just enough time to see him brace himself for some kind of violent impact.

 

Instead, you grab his face in your sweaty hands and pull him into a deep kiss. In this moment, you’re sure you hate him more than you love him. This obnoxious know-it-all. This brilliant man. Tall, muscular, brainy. Dammit.These confused, impassioned flames lick at your stomach and set you ablaze with lust.

 

He pulls you flush to his front and takes you inside, kicking the front door shut. He can’t be bothered to lock it. One of his hands has become ensnared in your hair and the other is lost up the back of your shirt, scratching gently and viciously and deliciously at your soft skin. Your hands creep up the front of his shirt.

 

“Stanford.”

 

“Ssh, I know,” he catches your bottom lip gently and runs the tip of his tongue across it so slowly, as though this is something he’ll never be able to do again.

 

“Is this really you?”

 

He pulls back and looks at you intently before pressing his cheek against yours—his stubble is prickly and tantalizing and this contact with him closes your throat up.

 

“Its me,” he whispers, tracing his nose all over your ear. “Its me. Please, let me take you to bed.” He leaves a ghost of a kiss on your ear. “We’ve waited much too long, my dear.”

 

 

 

 


	11. Crystals

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Warning: Smut.  
> In which the reader has a very intimate time with Ford and they speak about Fiddleford's condition.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi, all. I’m so, so sorry for the delay in this. I had a lot going on in my personal life with my career and the like, bouts of illness, etc. In between those times, I slowly fell out of this fandom and went back to Harry Potter. My sincerest apologies. Here is the update. I’m thinking there should only be a chapter or two after this one and then maybe an epilogue. Thank you for your continued support of this piece, whether it be by reading it, leaving kudos, and also comments. Take care, friends, and thanks for putting up with this damn hiatus.
> 
> Apologies for any spelling or grammatical errors. I am now using the word processing software, Ulysses, and it’s difficult to catch everything in it.  
> \--
> 
> “I know I'll wither so peel away the bark  
> Because nothing grows when it is dark  
> In spite of all my fears, I can see it all so clear  
> I see it all so clear.
> 
> Cover your crystal eyes  
> And feel the tones that tremble down your spine  
> Cover your crystal eyes  
> And let your colours bleed and blend with mine.”
> 
> -Of Monsters and Men, ‘Crystals’
> 
>  
> 
> Disclaimer: Chapter title from above song, as well. I don't own Gravity Falls, etc.

 

 

—

But he doesn’t take you to bed because you’re both much too impatient to trek up the unreliable and loud stairs, fumble down the dark and uneven hall, and estimate where the bedroom lie behind which closed door. In a fit of frustration or rage, Ford breaks from you to swipe the towers of books and papers from the couch onto the floor. It had turned into a table of sorts once again and much like it was when you first set foot in this cabin, showing that he hasn’t been living on it or sleeping on it as he had a few weeks ago.

You wildly wonder if he’s tucked himself away in the lab and you shiver, thinking that he’s shacked up with that strange, mechanical fortress of ill will and inter dimensional demons. He takes your shiver for some kind of excitement or fright and steadies you, his hands squeezing at your biceps.

He embraces you and lowers himself onto the couch first, aligning his back to the sunken cushions, his neck propped upon the armrest. One of your knees presses into the cushion space in between his legs and you steady yourself, pressing your palms flat against his chest. He swipes the curtain of hair away from your face and you feel his chest and abdomen muscles strain as he reaches up to you to leave a ghost of a kiss at the corner of your mouth. He pulls back and covers your hand with his much larger one, a finger on his other hand tracing a quick line down your uncovered hand.

He draws a breath, as though he’s about to say something to you. To confess something or apologize, because words at three in the morning somehow hold more truth than anything ever uttered in the daylight. But you don’t want to hear it. Ford gets easily distracted, derailed, and that is no good for this tame, yet heated moment of desire. You silence his mouth with a fingertip before tracing the line of his lower lip with the pad of your thumb. You change to all four finger tips, flat against his mouth, trailing a light line down his stubbled chin, his neck, towards his chest and into the neck of his shirt.

He catches your roaming hand in his and he brings your hand back to his mouth to kiss each fingertip in a thoughtful flutter of cotton-soft caresses. He doesn’t break eye contact from you in this act and you feel yourself tremble in the room’s chill (and not straying, wild thoughts this time) and from such an intimate act that seems so innocent from him, leaving you so vulnerable. You’d never felt so naked while fully clothed in all your life.

His eyes shine from behind his glasses and a glint of yellowed light from a far-off dying lamp reflects off the dingy lenses, and you pull your hand away from his possession to gently remove his glasses from his face. They go askew for only a moment as you slide them over his ears, and you fold them with such care as though closing the lid of a Faberge egg. Your shirt rides up when you lean over him to place his glasses upon another stack of books taking up residence on the small end table on the other side of the couch’s armrest. His hand, a little chilly, flattens against your abdomen pausing only a beat before sliding up and up, and then to your breast where he squeeze softly, dragging his thumb over the swell not covered by fabric.

You pull back to your previous position and look at him closely without his glasses on. In this moment, in the dead of night, in the barely morning, in a time that seems to be suspended between reality and living moments itself, you think about how he doesn’t look like Stanley at all. Because he looks like a shell of a man, a ghost person, someone who only recently got their soul back. His eyes are dark and hollow, but there’s a fire and the familiar warmth that you recall from the first time you knew him at all and it hurts your chest to see that goodness suffering behind a smog of discontent and ravaged chaos.

His dark hair has more flecks of gray in it and is in need of a trim. There are lines of exhaustion visible behind his stubble and wayward facial hairs apart from the stubble. You wonder if you look any different to him in this moment, in this strange place in time you’ve become entangled in with one another. A place in time where people are reflections of their true selves. In a time where decent people are in bed, sleeping through these late-night iterations of the more carnal, visceral aspects of mind, body, and spirit that are are always hidden behind the daylight masks of propriety and dignity.

Because you are taking too long to look at him, his hand slides from your breast and clutches at your hip, and speaks. “I don’t know how long I’ve loved you. It feels like ages. It feels like it happened through many life times, and in different dimensions. And sometimes, it feels like it never happened at all and I only ever knew you in a dream.”

“Stanford…” but it comes out like a whine, and you don’t mean it to sound so much like a desperate mewling, an absurd crow of longing.

His hands find your shoulders and he pulls you down to his chest, one hand on the back of your neck, the other holding your earlobe in between his thumb and forefinger. Your ear against his chest hears a fluttered, increased and almost irregular heartbeat and his exhale is shaky at best. You feel him hard against your thigh and your body flushes as violently as it had when you kissed moments ago.

Your hand trails a caress to his shorts and you groan at the warmth and the size of what you’re touching. He bucks his hips gently into your palm, grinding himself into you, your name coming out of his mouth in a swallowed moan. You slip your fingers into the boxer short’s front and unbuttoned slit and wrap your fingers around his shaft, thumb ghosting over the leaking tip, dragging the wet to the rest of his length. He cries out when your grip tightens and you stroke him gently.

He whimpers out an, ‘ah, fuck’ that excites you beyond all reason, sending a rush of lusty blood to your head and you pull away from his embrace. He takes this chance to pull off his boxers in one fluid motion. His thighs are pale and muscular. His short, but thick cock rests against his lower belly, leaking onto the trail of hair that ends in a dark thatch at his groin.

He flings his shirt off and tosses it across the room and strokes himself lightly while he watches you look at him as you undress yourself. Once shed of clothes, his hand falls away, resting at the top of his thigh.

“What do you want?” He asks this almost shyly and his eyes miss you like you’re not standing close to him. He asks this in a low murmur, like a thought in his brain he hadn’t meant to escape, and as though this is something he’s never done before. Like he’s never spoken to someone else like this before and you flush an excited heat that spreads everywhere when you think that the only other person who has probably heard him speak like this was Fiddleford.

You catch Stanford’s eyes in the dark when his head turns on the arm rest, away from the back of the couch that he nervously spoke to instead of you a moment ago, and you hope he can see your smile in your words, “Anything you’re comfortable with.”

You take your previous place, straddling him on the couch. His hands easily slide to the backs of your thighs and his caresses tickle you. His fingers spread upward and upward, their tips grazing the velvety flesh of your outer labia and he moans out your name in a long-syllable when you whine and grind down against him. He catches one labia between his thumb and forefinger and caresses it, massages it, his thumb creating a delicious friction against your inner labia and brushes against your clit. Your nose presses against the side of his and you sigh against his lips in a lazy kiss that he turns more fully to steady yourself on top of him.

You lower yourself to meet his pelvis with yours, his erection pressing into your wetness. His breath is hot on your neck as he licks your flushed skin before nipping and kissing to your collarbone. You press your nose into his hair and hiss against his forehead and groan as you both begin rocking into one another. His hands grip at your hips and he thrusts forward, but not entering you, a delicious friction all but electrifying your folds. Your hips stutter in a less than graceful rhythm when he bumps upward into you, stroking your sensitive clit with his leaking and swollen cock head.

“Are you okay? Is this okay?” His voice is husky, more a low growl than actual language. He keeps asking this even though he can feel you nodding helplessly against his shoulder, your ability to speak completely gone. His speech is growing quieter and quieter, until he’s mumbling again. “Do you like this? You like making my cock wet, don’t you?” You’re not sure how you can hear his confident whispers. “Probably not as much as I love having you on me.” His tongue wets your ear before nibbling at it in a painful, then gentle way. “Do you want me to enter you now? Do you want me to fuck you?” You’re not sure if you’re whining or near sobbing now, completely overwrought with a flood of emotion and raw, too sensitive sensations you thought you’d never feel from him.

“Yes.” You say, plead really, and kiss him furiously and fully on the mouth and cry out against his swollen lips when he enters you in one strong stroke.

He presses you closer to him as his hips arch and he stills, his hands hard on your hips, pressing you down and onto him, his length buried as deeply as he can go, but wanting you to swallow him more. He kisses back in a clumsy way and gives a nervous titter of a laugh, a breathless apology lost when he cries out at you picking up a steady rocking momentum. You arch your back and press your hands to his chest again and grip at the tufts of dark hair against pale skin. One of his hands leaves your hips and caresses your left breast, gripping your hip and biting his lip, and then caresses the other. He unlocks his own movements and matches your rhythm, pressing himself up by his elbow.

You wrap your legs around his waist and he wraps his arms around you, one hand pressed into the small of your back and the other in between your shoulder blades. Your chests touch and you whisper his name in a slow, dragged out moan when his soft chest hair rubs against your hard and sensitive nipples. He presses his cheek against yours, the rough stubble causes your chest to flush and your heart rate speeds up. He kisses you where your jaw meets your earlobe, whispering your name.

His hand leaves the small of your back and his thumb finds your swollen and sensitive clit and he strokes you timidly there, slowly at first, and then in tantalizing rapid circles. He gives you a shy smile (almost a smirk, really). “Are you close?”

“Just,” you pant out, “don’t stop, please.”

“I’m getting close, my dear. I apologize. It’s just been so long—“

You shut him up with a kiss, but this one is less frantic like the others, more sweet. He breaks the kiss to bring his thumb to his mouth and licks it, gets it wetter, and when he touches your sensitive nub once more, it’s all too much and you plunge your hands into his hair and grip at it as you mumble incoherent sounds into the side of his face, panting hot breath onto his neck.

“Oh shit,” he whines, and his hands fly to your hips and he pushes you off of him in the gentlest way possible. You fall back awkwardly onto your haunches, your orgasm interrupted and you take care of yourself as you watch him. He holds his shaft in one hand, and curls his other over his sensitive glans and comes in his palm in thick white ropes. His chest and neck are flushed from the act, but he’s blushing out of embarrassment from what you just witnessed him do. “I’m so sorry.”

“It’s fine, Stanford.” You cup his forearm and give him what you hope to be a reassuring look.

He picks up his shirt from the floor and cleans himself up with it and heaves a great sigh. He finally looks at you, his expression more relaxed and he looks sleepier. “I’m very glad you came to see me, Y/N. I’ve been thinking about you constantly.”

The transition is jarring and almost business-like, but you don’t know what else you could have expected from him. He matches your sitting position, facing you and touches your face. His eyes strain against the dark to get a good look at you and he tilts your face up by your chin, catching your mouth in his for quite some time, until he finishes with a timid and shy peck at the corner of your mouth.

He pulls away and you’re tired and just want to go to sleep with him on this couch, him spooning you from behind to keep you warm. But, classic Stanford, as always, must continue speaking when he feels like he needs to. “You know, part of me just kept telling myself that you’d come back.” His palms are resting upon his thighs, his fingertips playing with the dark, black hairs there.

You raise an eyebrow at him because these words have rubbed you the wrong way—Ford has always had this effect on many people, even yourself sometimes. You go to say something back, now fully alert from a surge of adrenaline that sprung from the thought that you’re probably going to have to start debating him on something. That after this perfect and tender moment, he’s ready to continue the fight that started weeks ago when the house was full, housing your other loved ones.

He reaches behind the arm rest his back is against and you can’t help but let your eyes graze over him in a languid way at his hairy chest and abdomen and biceps when they stretch, showing how toned they are as he plucks his eyeglasses where you sat them. When he pushes them up his nose in such a professor-esque way, he returns his own gaze and full attention to you, and looks alarmed at the pissed off look that’s settling its place on your face. He hastily catches your fingers in his hands and kisses their tips, looks at you over the top of his glasses.

His apology is clumsy and so quick that it seems insincere, but it’s just so incredibly _Ford_ that you can’t not give him a chance to listen to what he has to say. “I didn’t mean that in a ‘I knew she’d come crawling back to me’ kind of way. I do hope you know me better than that, my dear.” He plunges his hands into his sex-sweat slicked hair and pressed it back from his forehead. He chews nervously at his bottom lip before resting his hands back upon his thighs (this time not fidgeting like he had before), and goes on, “Something just told me to wait for you. Because you’d be worth it.” He shuts his eyes and shakes his head in a berating way towards himself. “I don’t mean it like that, either. I just meant that you’ve always been worth it to me. I don’t know how else to try and say this correctly, so I’ll stop talking now.” He offers you a crooked smile and you can tell just how desperately he hopes that you take him and his apology seriously and think of him as authentic.

You don’t swoon over his words; that’s something you’d never really done at him before. He just didn’t have the same charisma as Stan and Hadron, but there was something else about Ford that was just as charming and enchanting and you perhaps think that it has everything to do with his rugged righteousness. However, you are incredibly touched and warmed by his words because you know they must not have been the easiest thing for him to say to you, especially uttered after such an intimate act that they follow. “Thank you, Ford.”

You pause for a beat and look at him in a way that you hope is gently appraising and not in a scolding or judgmental way. You think about the terms that you left him on, the terms that he forced Stan and Hadron to leave the house on. “I was very angry at you. With you.” Now it’s time for you to chew your own lip. “I still kind of am.” And you feel right to be. Sex is never a magic or quick fix in a relationship and you want him to know that. You don’t know what it meant to him or how he used it in his previous relationships, and you need him to know that this new physical relationship with him is _not_ his previous relationships.

“I know; I was angry at me, too.” And that is some kind of lie, you think, because when it comes to Ford, most of the things he usually gets mad about oftentimes have nothing to do with himself, but what others have done to him. He gives a self-deprecating laugh at this admission and his eyes look at you hopeful, wanting you to join in the laugh. His hand flies to the back of his neck and he rubs briskly, nervously.

But you don’t laugh when he wants you to; if anything, your frown grows. “I didn’t say that to make you feel terrible about yourself. I just needed to tell you. I never wanted to hate you—I never want to hate anyone, especially someone who meant—and still means—a great deal to me.”

Ford doesn’t say anything to this, but there is a strange tick or tug that electrifies in face in less than a second that shows you: of anything you could have possibly said to him, this is not what he expected. Meaning, that he never expect you to feel so strongly and in this way towards him, particularly after everything that happened between the both of you. And the others, always,

“…the others?” He asks, brow furrowed, not in anger, but concerned with how you’d zoned out in your thoughts.

“I’m sorry, Ford.” You blink rapidly and shake your head slightly, shaking all of the distracted feelings away from your clouded mind and attention. “What is it? What did you say?”

“I _asked_ ,” there is an edge to his voice and you can just hear him fighting back the urge to roll his eyes at you, “if you’d spoken to the others?”

You wonder if a small lie here would be worth it. If you could say something about them that wouldn’t make him worry in the slightest. Would he worry? Maybe. But, just as well as you know Ford, you assume that he perhaps knows, if not more, about you and could easily see through any flits of deception you would try to slip him.

So, yes, you tell him that yes, you’ve seen the others…but only briefly. Some of the smallest snapshots of moments in time that you’d ever seen go past you in your entire life and how strange that it just happened to have occurred with two of the most important people you’d spent so long surrounding yourself with, filling your heart up with, and suffocating on their reciprocated love. And you can see Stanford’s face react in such a way that he wordlessly wonders how they are, that he would ask you if only he had the guts to do so (which, emotionalism has never been his strongest suit and you’re sure he doesn’t have any kind of vocabulary in his lexicon to begin a softened, sensitive, delicate way to ask this about you).

And here is where you absolutely cannot lie to him. No matter the ill feelings that are seeping their way back into your chest as he slowly slips back into his clinical way of handling things that may seem like even a slight inconvenience to him. His eyes turn into judgmental, glaring slits as he waits on your words, waits to formulate a wild and inappropriate reaction. And then, perhaps, you are being unfair with the expectations you’ve placed on him. Perhaps, he has slowly become a different man. Solitude must have done something to him, forced some strange reckoning upon him, cleaned up his heart and mind in some unexpected and fortunate way.

You smile slightly at the thought and, again, he mirrors your movements in these moments, until your frown is back immediately—you don’t wish him to assume that good news is on the way. And you’ve both cut yourselves wide open and bared it all in front of one another for you to cling so hard to whatever subtleties that somehow ‘worked’ before, in the most avoidant sense at least.

“Terrible.” You clear out the tickle in the back of your throat with a short cough, covering your mouth with your fist. Then you realize the absolute absurdity of this deep conversation you’re having with him, both of you stark naked, and you cross your arms over your bare chest. You steel yourself after he looks taken aback at this action, and you go on. “They’re doing terribly, Stanford.” And he hears what you don’t say: that you are absolutely floored with just how pretty awful they are doing in the short amount of time you’ve all been away from one another.

And it makes you wonder if in some sense you were all once so good for one another (regardless of the strange twinges hurtful conflict left behind after terrible conversations and nasty glares) and kept one another afloat and somehow put-together. And in this moment, you hate the slippage that is occurring between you and Ford—it is unspoken, but as electrified as your shared orgasms, and extremely tangible with how thickly it hangs in the air). You’d expected some kind of resistance from him as you made your way back to this cabin, some kind of conflict or defiance was absolutely expected and you’d even rehearsed some possible responses to his presupposed hatefulness. But against this bracing of yourself, you’d hopped even stronger that he’d welcome you with love, and he did, but of course it didn’t last very long. At least, not in the sense that you wanted it to, to where it is easy and fluid and roots you to him and in this home. The timing had been wrong and you somehow knew that on your way over in this trying time, just as you’d expected it months ago.

And you also wonder if you will ever be able to freely love Stanford Pines, or if the timing will always be riddled with his supercilious bullshit or some magnificent troubles. You wonder, and hope, if at some point all of this will go away and you can just _be_ with him somehow…even if it’s in another time, even when you’re older.

Ford goes to chew at the tip of his thumb lightly, and instead jabs it softly onto his lip a few times before wiggling his fingers at you in that equally obnoxious and adorable way when he wants to place emphasis upon his words. “Fiddleford’s lost his mind, hasn’t he?” His brows quirk upward softly, softly, and his chest heaves out a defeated sigh. His eyes are wide and almost glistening behind his glasses as he waits, yet again, for you to answer him.

He mirrors the way you’re holding yourself in front of him, and he covers his bare chest with his strong arms and you can’t help but take in how strange it is. You shift to sit crosslegged in front of him, but he is still on his knees, his penis now soft and lolled over to the side, resting on his thigh. You cannot believe that just moments ago, you’d been as intimate as possible with him, and you feel a flush of severely affectionate heat flush throughout your body at such an inopportune time.

And there it is: Fiddleford’s now-delicate condition. What you wanted to come speak to Ford about in the first place. What you’d originally wanted him for before you’d realized just how much you _wanted_ him. And he must have known that _this_ (this nakedness, this previous sex act) isn’t what you’d come to him for…he must have known you wouldn’t have come calling at his door way past the dead of night if it wasn’t because somebody else was in trouble.

“How did you know?”

“His journal.” He says this like it’s the simplest thing in all of the world, almost surprised that you didn’t think that he’d at least have some idea about Fiddleford’s journal. You wonder Ford must have seen the contents in it earlier on before all of the personal entries, but you don’t ask because Ford’s going on, “Before we placed our emblems on the covers, they were identical. We’d done some field work one day.” He uncrosses his arms to plunge his hands in his thick, dark hair once more, fidgeting with the strands before smoothing his locks away from his brow once more. He cocks his head to the side and looks upwards, toward the ceiling as he recalls, “We’d come back so late—this was before you came around—and we’d mixed our journals up. We learned more than we would have liked to about one another that night. But it was an unspoken agreement that we wouldn’t bring up what we’d read about one another. What we’d found about one another’s private research.”

You let out a breath you didn’t know you’d been holding. This was better than worrying about finding Fiddleford’s journal at all or some kind of ragged documentation he’d either squirreled away underneath a loose floorboard, or that may not have even been in the cabin anymore. “Is there a way to reverse the damage that’s been done?” You must know.

Ford slides to sitting with his legs crossed and faces you, his hands on his knees, gripping them, really. “I don’t know so much about reversing the damage. If he didn’t destroy the vials that contain the networking of thoughts and emotions that compose the discarded or erased memories, then there is a chance we could find his machine that shows them to you. But, I don’t know if it would stick with him, and I don’t know if it would bring back any shard of health that’s been shaved off of him.”

You must look devastated because you’re startled when he leans forward and takes your face in your hands. “Whatever it is, I’ll help in anyway that I can, if that means anything.” He wipes a tear away with the pad of his thumb. “You do know that he must ask for or want our help, though, yes?”

You nod in his hands and he murmurs, “Good girl,” before pulling you up to stand with him. He shifts to where you’re in front of him and his hands ghost a grip upon your waist as he walks you up the stairs and down the dark hall, and into his bedroom. “The morning will come fast. We need all the rest we can get, my dear.”

He lays you down on the bed and then follows upon in, pulls you to his side and you rest your head on his chest and drift off with his arms around you, his nose in your hair, and his brief kisses at your temple. When your breathing slows and you’re almost asleep, you hear him murmur, “I’m trying to be better than you expect me to be; I hope you’ll see that in time.”

You aren’t sure if that was meant for you to hear, but it’s all you can think of until sleep comes for you in the waking hours of the morning light.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don’t mean to insinuate in this chapter that the only way to fix relationships is to have sexual contact. I just thought it was about time this happened in this story is all.
> 
> \--
> 
> Again, thank you to anyone who is still reading this piece.


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